Today’s
energy industry is perhaps the world’s most powerful. Energy is the basis of
all this world’s wealth, and for perhaps earth’s entire history, the sun’s
energy has fueled all ecological and economic systems. If early humans did not
learn to exploit new sources of energy, humankind would still be living with its
ape cousins in the tropical forests. Without the continual exploitation of new
energy sources, there would have been no civilization, no Industrial Revolution
and no looming global catastrophe.

All
life on earth consumes the sun’s energy, originally captured
by the process of photosynthesis, except for chemical-synthesizing bacteria, which might be responsible
for part of the world’s oil deposits. There is an audacious theory recently posited
by Thomas Gold of Cornell that all the so-called “fossil fuels” were not created
by life processes, but by purely chemical processes of earth’s formation. If
that is so, the news is worse for humanity’s long-term prospects, as we are rapidly
depleting a resource, with no way to make more, as well as creating environmental
devastation by mining and using it.

Millions
of years ago, humanity’s evolutionary ancestors lived in Africa’s
tropic forests, as did their great ape cousins, and fruit was their dietary
mainstay. By walking upright and making tools, humanity’s ancestors exploited
new energy resources, such as animal remains scavenged from predator kills. Early
protohumans migrated from Africa about two million years ago, probably following
migrating African predators. They eventually harnessed fire
and invented other energy-consuming/preserving adaptations, such as clothing,
which allowed them to survive past their natural range in the tropics.

About 100,000 years
ago, anatomically modern humans appeared on the scene. By about
40,000 years ago, humans improved their weapons technology to the point where
they became earth’s first and only superpredator, expanding its range across the
entire planet. By about 10,000 years ago, humanity had exterminated all the easily hunted large animals, and the
hunter-gatherer lifestyle was no longer sustainable on a global basis. Domestication
of animals and food crops led to civilization. Domesticating animals, plants
and enslaving humans were the significant activities of early
civilization, and ideological indoctrination began in those early days, as
the slaves needed to be conditioned to accept their status. The positions of
the new elite classes also needed an acceptable justification. Often the most
ruthless and successful elites became “royalty.”

The
human journey has largely been about refining methods of exploiting energy and
manipulating the natural environment to human benefit. The West calls that process
“progress.” The extinction of large, easily killed animals was probably the earliest
instance of humans exhausting their primary energy source (although original migrations
from Africa might have been due to outstripping energy supplies - largely fruit
- in the tropical forests). Early agricultural practices also exhausted the lands,
although the dynamic of deforestation, farming and desertification
persists to this day. As the energy of wood was used up, and the resultant deforested
lands were devastated by agricultural practices, other sources of energy were
exploited, leading to the “fossil fuel” revolution, which began with coal mining in Europe and China about a
millennium ago. Less than 150 years ago, oil became the next
fuel to undergo large-scale exploitation, and its use coincided with amassing
capitalistic, monopolistic empires, significantly by United States robber barons,
John Rockefeller most notably. His oil companies still
dominate the oil industry, and fossil fuels comprise about
85% of world energy production today. The process of extracting and using fossil
fuels is environmentally disastrous. Rapid global warming, mainly caused by burning fossil fuels, is
one of the greatest threats that humanity faces
today.

The West’s capitalistic ideology has transformed a traditional
deadly sin, greed, into a virtue, and the racketeering
impulse has guided the creation of all capitalistic empires. Every
significant industry and profession is largely a self-serving racket, and the
larger and more powerful the industry or profession is, the more it resembles
an outright racket, something I discovered the hard way during my adventures. I participated in a significant effort to
bring alternative energy to the marketplace. What happened to the venture that
Dennis Lee headed is a case study of how alternative
energy is suppressed. Alternative energy has been systematically suppressed, on a global
scale, for the past century, and free energy technology has probably existed for
a long time. Free energy would eliminate the energy industry, help heal the earth,
increase humanity’s standard of living by perhaps a few orders of magnitude, and
could end the Zero-Sum Game that humanity has been playing for the past 10,000
years. Tom Bearden and friends are mounting the latest
run at it. The extent to which they succeed will probably be directly proportional
to the public support they receive. The exploitation of energy may exterminate
the human species, but it does not have to be that way. If we wake up and begin
caring, solving our problems is easy. If we stay asleep, we are doomed. The
problem has a lot more to do with integrity than technology or intelligence.
Personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity, and it needs
to become more plentiful if humanity is to avoid its self-extinction. It is up
to us.

A Brief Prehistory of Energy and Life on Earth

Ninety-three
million miles away is the star my planet orbits. It is an average star, one of
about 200 billion in its galaxy, placed on one of the galaxy’s outer arms. Our
galaxy is unremarkable, one of perhaps a trillion that are within range of today’s
telescopes. According to today’s theories, our star has been burning for about
4.6 billion years, and will burn for seven billion more before it consumes its
fuel and dies. As our star settled into its life, something happened on a tiny
fragment that orbits it. That fragment - a mere mote in the cosmos - is nearly
completely metallic, largely composed of iron, but on its surface a thin layer
of lighter elements “rose” and settled. That layer is relatively as thick as
an apple’s skin, a layer that humanity calls home. Eight elements
- oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, sodium, potassium and magnesium -
make up nearly 99% of the earth’s crust. Some even lighter elements ride atop
those elements, with an oxygen-hydrogen compound covering most of earth’s surface,
and nitrogen, oxygen and argon comprising 99.9% of the atmosphere. There are
merely trace amounts of carbon, sulfur, chlorine, fluorine and some others, with
most elements occurring in tiny amounts in the earth’s crust.

Scientists
have developed theories, partly based upon observations, which guess what may have happened a long time ago. The
oxygen-hydrogen compound that blankets earth, known as water, would be a gas instead
of a liquid, except for the peculiar way that water
molecules are attracted to each other, due to their electrical polarity.
In the atmosphere is carbon dioxide, which makes up less
than 0.04% of the atmosphere. However, if it were not there, helping to capture
the sun’s energy, earth’s surface would probably be about 10-15° F colder than today.
The fortuitous properties of water and carbon dioxide helped set the stage for
something apparently unique in our star system. Today, it is theorized that life
began more than three billion years ago on earth. For
about three billion years, life was largely confined to unicellular organisms,
which lived in the ocean. In order for life to exist, it needed energy, and from
the earliest examples we know of, the sun’s energy was captured to fuel that life.

According to today’s understanding, stars are
fusion reactors, mostly composed of hydrogen, the universe’s simplest element.
Hydrogen is fused into helium, the next simplest element, in a star’s core, and
a vast amount of energy is thereby given off. The processes of fusion and fission
involve an atom’s nucleus. When the fusion reaction occurs, energy is given off
in the form of electromagnetic radiation (ER), called light when it occurs at
particular wavelengths. Light is still an enigma to science, because it seems
to be a wave at times and a particle at others. In its wave state, the length
of the wave determines how much energy it carries. Radio waves are long waves
of ER, and the energy they carry is relatively small. X-rays are short waves,
and their relative energy is great. What is called light has a wavelength between
those of radio waves and X-rays. The sun produces ER in a wide array of wavelengths
(also known as frequencies; the longer the wavelength, the less the frequency,
as the velocity is constant). Also, the sun shoots out electrons and other subatomic
particles at an extremely high velocity.

If
not for earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, its surface would be bombarded
with high-energy ER and subatomic particles, and life as we know it would not
exist. Earth, however, has a magnetic belt (called the Van Allen belt) and atmospheric
layers such as the ozone layer that deflect and absorb much of the high-energy
ER that the sun emits. Most of the sun’s energy that hits earth’s surface is
in the visible spectrum of light. Although light acts as a wave, that wave comes
in discrete “packets” known as quanta.

An
atom is made of a nucleus orbited by electrons. The electrons orbit at varying
distances from the nucleus in “shells,” depending on the electrons’
energy levels. That variable energy level of the electron shell is what makes
life possible.

As life first came into existence on earth, whether through evolution
or being “planted” here by our galactic neighbors or from beyond this dimension,
there was a trick it “learned” that made life on earth possible: it captured the
sun’s energy. There is more than one way it happens, but they all fall under
the category of photosynthesis (except for heat-synthesizing, subterranean bacteria).
The chemistry is complicated, but in essence the photons of sunlight hit the chlorophyll
in plant cells, and the electron shells absorb that energy. With that increased
energy, the atom can form bonds with other atoms that it could not previously
accomplish. Usually, the energy from photosynthesis allows a plant to combine
water and carbon dioxide into a sugar known as glucose. Animals fuel their bodies
with glucose. Glucose is a sugar, and is the simplest member of a class
of substances known as carbohydrates. Other simple sugars are fructose and galactose.
Through that captured sunlight energy more bonds can be formed, and glucose can
bond with itself and other substances such as water to create more complicated
sugars, such as sucrose, lactose and maltose. The bonding can become even more
complicated to create complex carbohydrates such as starches and cellulose. Next
to glucose, cellulose may be the most important carbohydrate as far as earthly
life is concerned, because cellulose comprises the cell walls, and hence most
of the structure, of plants. Without cellulose, there would not be trees, flowers,
grass, or much of anything living beyond the oceans, and little in them.

A little less than 600 million years ago,
there was a great leap of evolution. The three billion years of microscopic organism
evolution gave way to a myriad of complicated plant and animal life. Complex
sea animals developed, with fish appearing about 500 million years ago. By 430
million years ago, land plants with vascular systems developed. Amphibians and
insects appeared about 410 years ago, and by 360 million years ago, great fern
forests had developed in the tropical heat. About 330 million years ago, reptiles
made their appearance, with dinosaurs and mammals making their debut 240 million
years ago, and birds appearing 205 million years ago. Flowering plants appeared
about 135 million years ago. About 65 million years ago, dinosaurs died out and primates appeared. That
is about the accepted story in scientific circles today, of course subject to
revision, perhaps radical, as more evidence comes to light.

Less than 600 million years ago, when evolution took its great leap
forward, the oceans teemed with life. The ocean bottom became the resting place
for dead marine organisms, mainly plankton. Those seabeds became layered thicker
with dead matter, and where conditions were favorable they eventually formed today’s
oil deposits (Gold’s theory to the contrary). Beginning about
360 million years ago and continuing for about 70 million years, those fern forests
initiated the carboniferous period. Those fern
forests probably created earth’s coal deposits. With coal and oil, the oxygen
was eventually released, as well as most of the hydrogen, leaving behind compounds
rich in carbon. Carbon is the chemical basis for all life on earth, due to its
unique properties, which have to do with its electron shell. The eight
electron outer shell of carbon has four electrons. Its half-empty or half-full
electron shell is similar to hydrogen’s, but carbon can create amazing bonding
arrangements with other elements, forming long chains, and carbon atoms can make
double and triple bonds with each other. There is an entire branch of chemistry
devoted to carbon. On the first day of my organic chemistry class in 1977, my
professor said that although the modern age is known by many names, for organic
chemists the modern age would be known as the “age of waste.” All those carbon
compounds in coal and oil, with all of its complicated bonds, are a treasure trove
of potential chemistry, and were probably created from the solar energy captured
by photosynthesis. While burning them has powered the Industrial Revolution and
today’s world, organic chemists see it as an immense waste of a resource. Mining
and burning it is about its crudest possible use.

Carbon,
oxygen and hydrogen comprise most of living organisms. Nitrogen makes up 78%
of earth’s atmosphere. Nitrogen is the primary atmospheric gas because it is
practically inert. Nitrogen needs temperatures in excess of 3000°
F in order to react with other elements. Consequently, it almost never does.
There is one major exception, however. The earliest organisms were bacteria,
and bacteria are probably still poorly understood by today’s orthodox science.
Bacteria are essential to all “higher” forms of life. Although nitrogen is generally
inert on earth, bacteria are able to incorporate nitrogen into their chemical
reactions, and nitrogen is the next most vital element to life. If bacteria did
not capture nitrogen in its chemical reactions, life as we know it would not exist.
Carbohydrates and fats are composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen and provide
nearly all of life’s fuel, but nitrogen is the essential element that makes DNA,
proteins, enzymes and other vital chemicals possible. The human body is about
60% water. If the water is removed, about half of what remains is protein.

Bacteria continually take nitrogen from the
atmosphere and combine it with other elements, such as hydrogen (ammonia is made
of one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms), in a process known as nitrogen fixing,
and that captured nitrogen becomes incorporated into plants, through their roots.
Animals eat plants, and that nitrogen becomes part of their chemistry. There
are several “nitrogen cycles” in earth’s ecosystems, with bacteria taking nitrogen
from the atmosphere, and returning it (denitrifying bacteria do that) as
they digest dead plant and animal material. As evolution continued, animals appeared
that ate other animals. In “food chains,” energy would cycle through life forms,
with predators sitting atop those chains. There cannot be too many predators
atop those energy pyramids. Predators are the rarest class of life forms, especially
mammalian predators.

Over the eons,
the sun’s energy shined upon Earth, fueling earth’s ecosystems. About 30% of
the sun’s energy that reaches earth is immediately reflected away by the atmosphere,
clouds and earth’s surface. The other 70% is radiated back into space more slowly,
90% of the 70% remainder is from the atmosphere radiating energy to space. The
energy absorbed and more slowly radiated back to space is what makes air at the
earth's surface average about 60° F., makes the rest of the earth’s
atmosphere as warm as it is, is the main cause of its circulation, and drives
what is called the hydrological cycle, which is how water circulates through the
earth. The sun’s energy makes water evaporate from the earth’s surface (mainly
the oceans), form clouds, fall as precipitation, and on land circulates through
our lakes, rivers and underground aquifers, leading back to the oceans, where
the cycle begins anew. A tiny fraction of 1% (one-twentieth of 1%) of the sun’s
energy is captured by photosynthesis.

That
solar energy captured by photosynthesis is the basis for all life and all “wealth”
on earth. In human terms, wealth is what sustains our lives and makes them more
livable. In its simplest terms, wealth is food, and for the majority of humanity
today, it remains that way. Getting enough food to eat is the primary preoccupation
of most people, and it has been that way for humanity’s entire journey on earth.
Only recently, as humanity learned to mine coal and oil, have humans had to deal
with obesity on a large scale, as the West does today. More than half of all adults are overweight. That
obesity is directly related to starving other humans, however. There are a little
more than a billion each of overweight and underweight people on earth today,
and the relationship is a direct one.

There is far more than enough water on earth’s
surface to have entirely covered it with water. Fortunately, earth’s crust has
slight irregularities, and the crust poked up through the water in a few places,
those high points forming the continents, covering about 28% of earth’s surface.
Earth does not orbit the sun in a circle, but in a slight ellipse. The earth
also has an axis of rotation out of alignment of its plane of orbit, which causes
the seasons. That axis of rotation wobbles and has changed over the eons, both
relative to earth’s surface and relative to its plane of orbit (called the ecliptic).
Also, those bits of crust that poke up through the oceans have drifted across
earth’s surface, colliding with each other, breaking up and drifting apart. Ocean
floors became mountain ranges, and vice versa. Ocean sediments and fern forests
became buried, forming rock-like substances, containing the energy of that sunlight
that was captured eons ago.

There are various theories regarding earth’s climate changes, the
most dramatic being the ice ages that have come and gone for billions of years,
and when comets and other celestial objects have slammed into earth and released
energies that make nuclear weapons no more than children’s toys. Changing rotational
axes and orbital variations, drifting continents, variations in how much energy
the sun gives off, possible interstellar dust clouds and the like have been proposed
for earth’s variable climate, and all may play their role. The eleven-year sunspot
cycle is an obvious variable, and the lack of observed sunspots during the late
17th century correlated strikingly with the heart of the “Little
Ice Age” from about 1430 to 1850.

In
the latest ice ages, they have predominantly happened in the northern hemisphere,
related to the fact that the Arctic Ocean is virtually landlocked. The Pleistocene
Ice Age began about 1.6 million years ago, and the latest interglacial period
began about twelve thousand years ago.

As life on earth evolved, incredibly complicated and diverse ecosystems
developed. Bacteria and other microscopic organisms led to complex plants and
animals, and biology became increasingly “sophisticated.” Fish evolved more complicated
and sophisticated biology, such as in fins and respiration systems. Plants became
more complicated and sophisticated, in both forms of growth and reproduction.
Land animals became vastly more diverse and complicated. Larger animals learned
to fly, and warm-blooded animals appeared. Awesome forms of symbiosis developed
between plants, animals and microscopic organisms, where entire ecosystems evolved
from the life form interactions. Flowering plants appeared
about 135 years ago, with a novel reproductive strategy. Flowers are attractive
to insects, birds and other animals, and as they feed from flowers, they spread
pollen. Fruit forms from pollinated flowers, and is largely comprised of sugars,
from which animals can easily extract energy. Animals in turn spread
the seeds within the fruit. Many animals adapted to take advantage of fruit’s
energy. Producing fruit is a great concentration of a plant’s available energy,
something done far more easily in tropical regions than otherwise, with the tropics’
greater available energy.

Today, scientists
think that dinosaurs eventually evolved to be endothermic, which means that they
regulated their body temperatures. Mammals further enhanced the endothermic process,
and their fur allowed them to survive in colder areas better than exothermic animals,
and therefore less dependent on direct solar energy, as today’s reptiles, amphibians
and fish are.

Primates appeared about the time dinosaurs became extinct. The
opposable thumb of primates allowed for manipulative abilities previously unseen
on earth. Primates were originally tree dwelling, living in tropical forests,
and thumbs probably evolved in response to the arboreal environment, to make navigating
branches and eating fruit and other tree foods easier.

With
molecular biology coming into its own, the analysis of DNA and genes has provided
evidence previously unavailable. In the United States, DNA testing is proving
the innocence of many people who have been on death row, wrongly convicted of
murder. DNA research has also determined that humanity’s closest biological cousin
is the chimpanzee, followed by gorillas and orangutans. More than 98% of a chimpanzee’s
DNA is identical to human DNA. Although a global effort is trying hard to suppress
all evidence of extraterrestrial influence, the day is probably not far off
when it is acknowledged that earth is not the universe’s only place with intelligent
life, and that humanoid life on earth has probably had plenty of help from its
galactic neighbors. The various theories of evolution are due for some major
revisions once the extraterrestrial/inter-dimensional influence is acknowledged,
as well as the role of consciousness. Still, such a revelation will not completely
invalidate evolutionary theory. It will simply make it more complete, and will
probably eliminate the materialism from it, something long overdue.

Today’s human race probably appeared first in Africa, the first
erect, large-brained protohumans appearing more than two million years ago. Today’s
great ape diet is about 65% live fruit, and the rest is blossoms, seeds, leaves,
insects and a slight amount of animal flesh (although the most carnivorous part
of the mountain gorilla’s diet is insects). Humans, as with all animals, are
designed to eat living food, and live fruit should ideally comprise more than
half of the human diet. It does not, however, and that is because of the human
journey and today’s impoverished human diet, as it migrated past its natural range
in the tropics.

Those early protohumans
are the first animals that began making tools, and those surviving to be analyzed
by modern anthropologists are made of stone. Early stone implements were crude,
but worked better than hands and strength. The first stone tools obviously made
more food available, crushing nuts and exposing difficult-to-reach digestible
plant parts. Also, early stone tools probably allowed for more effective scavenging
of animals, such as cracking open bones to eat the marrow. Those were the first
energy-enhancing inventions of intelligent apes. Over the millennia, more effective
tools and uses of them were invented. Bones, wood and other objects were incorporated
into early tool-making activities.

The rise of human beings was dependent on three factors. The first
was common to all life: the sun’s energy. The second was the opposable thumb,
which appeared about 65 million years ago, and it created a level of manipulative
ability that no other animal had. The third was increasing intelligence, which
used that manipulative ability to make tools, and thereby harness more energy
than other creatures had available. The requisite intelligence began appearing
about two million years ago.

Originally,
those early innovations allowed humanoid apes to increase the available food energy
in their local environment. It is thought that early protohumans followed African
predators such as lions, scavenging from their kills, competing with other scavengers.
That relationship is probably why early protohumans left Africa, following the
African predators as they migrated from Africa about two million years ago. Humans
are slow, weak animals, and could do little hunting on their own at first. Potential
prey easily eluded them, and were difficult to kill with the available means.
When early protohumans followed those African predators, they largely expanded
their range across Asia, staying in the tropical and near-tropical zones, which
were similar to their native environment. The problem, however, with moving away
from the tropics was that the growing season would not be year-round, and that
essential fruit would not be available. As humans followed the African predators,
they began modifying their diets, eating less fruit and other plant material,
and eating more animal flesh. Although humans have been able to adapt to a more
flesh-based diet, it came at considerable cost. Protein constitutes half the
dehydrated human body, but the consumption of the amino acids needed to create
protein was largely done for structure and chemistry, not fuel. Protein provides
about ten percent of the human diet’s calories today, although mother’s milk is
only a few percent protein, when humans do their greatest body-building. As humans
became more carnivorous, they began using animal flesh for fuel, not to provide
amino acids and nutrients. Humans are far from ideal carnivores.
Many serious health problems, including nearly all
epidemic diseases, have resulted from humanity’s carnivorous ways.

As protohumans continued evolving, their range
expanding across Asia and leaving the tropics, they invented means to survive.
As they ranged to colder climates, they learned to wear the fur of other mammals,
either found dead or killed by enterprising protohumans.

At
least 500,000 years ago, protohumans created their first truly great invention,
which exploited energy in a way never done before: harnessing fire. By 400,000
years ago, artificially created fire was a regular part of early human life.
Wood is largely made from cellulose, which is formed from the bonds created by
linking water with carbon dioxide. Wood is mainly made of air and water. When
it is burned, the energy captured by photosynthesis is released, and the water
and carbon dioxide are released back to the environment. Ashes are made from
the minerals (mainly metals) that the plant extracted from the soil as it grew.
By harnessing fire, early humans could exploit the sun’s energy of hundreds of
years, not just what fell to earth that year. Fire provided warmth, protection
from predators, and fire was the first food processor. Again, that invention
exacted a great cost, while it allowed for “progress.”

About
100,000 years ago, modern humans appeared on the evolutionary scene. They probably
first appeared in Africa.[1]
Anthropologists have identified quite a few protohuman species, appearing and
disappearing. When modern humans appeared, the Neanderthal people were well established,
but died out. All protohuman “competitors” eventually died out (whether “naturally”
or by extraterrestrial and/or inter-dimensional intervention is an open question
for me), leaving Homo sapiens sapiens alone on the human scene.

Ice sheets advanced and
retreated in the northern hemisphere during the evolutionary journey of early
humans. As near as anthropologists can tell today, about 40,000 years ago, stone
tools took a leap forward in sophistication, and humans were able to refine the
art of survival and exploit opportunities previously unavailable. About 40,000
years ago, humans greatly expanded their range. They probably invented the first
boats then, allowing them to expand their range to Australia and the New World.
They also refined hunting to a science, and the extinction of large animals in
Australia and the New World seems to roughly coincide with when humans showed
up. Human hunters probably drove many large animals species to extinction. Changing
interglacial climates and ecosystems surely had their effect, but the over-kill
hypothesis is persuasive.[2]

In
historical times, humans migrating to islands such as New Zealand, Hawaii and
Madagascar quickly drove many native bird (and large animals, such as a pygmy
hippopotamus on Madagascar) species to extinction. When Europeans took over the
world, they also drove island human populations to extinction, such as the Taino
of the Caribbean and the aboriginal inhabitants
of Tasmania.[3] What history has seen when humans
migrated to islands was probably a microcosm of what happened when humans migrated
to Australia and the New World. Although there remains plenty of controversy
about the megafauna extinctions in North America, because retreating ice sheets
changed the topography and vegetation, South America and Australia did not have
ice sheets, and experienced similar megafauna extinctions. The appearance of
humans appears to be the most significant variable related to those extinctions.[4]

The destruction
of large mammals probably made for the golden age of hunter-gatherers, and lasted
for many human generations. Humankind became a superpredator, excelling at killing
and eating anything that moved, and while they hunted large animals to extinction,
they also began killing each other. Today’s hunter-gatherer people are proportionally
more violent than civilized peoples. Although it can be hazardous to extrapolate
today’s observations to human culture 40,000 years ago, becoming a superpredator
also created the means to prey upon each other, a situation nearly unknown in
the animal world.

The
bow-and-arrow was invented about 25,000 years ago, in the vicinity of Europe,
a couple thousand years before pottery appeared in the same region. Pottery allowed
for better food preservation and preparation. Fire, clothing, refined tools,
weapons, shelter, boats, pottery and the like contributed to rising human lifestyles
outside its natural range. It all had to do with the capture of energy, either
reducing the loss of body heat, as with clothes and shelter, exploiting new sources
of energy, as with hunting large animals and burning wood, or preserving digestible
energy, as with pottery and other food preservation and storage techniques.

Early
Civilization, Energy and the Zero-Sum Game

The
hunter-gatherer lifestyle allowed humanity to migrate to earth’s furthest reaches.
By 10,000 years ago, there were about 4 million humans on earth, and most of the
easily hunted big animals had been rendered extinct. The time scale of those
events is vast in comparison to a human life, and relatively rapid events on the
geologic or evolutionary timescale happened with few, if any, humans perceiving
the trends. The process was far from uniform, but about ten thousand years ago
the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was no longer sustainable on a global scale. The
Malthusian limit had been reached. Relatively
little wild vegetation provides the energy that humans can digest, particularly
in lands beyond the tropics, with their seasons. In at least three separate places,
China, the “Fertile Crescent” and Mesoamerica, humans
began domesticating plants and animals.

The
plant parts that can provide human-digestible energy, mainly in the form of sugars,
starches and fats, were largely found in the fruits, seeds and roots of certain
plants. Today, it is thought that women began domesticating plants, as an adjunct
to their gathering activities (it was not easy dragging along infants on hunts,
and men were faster and stronger, better suited for hunting activity). Women
experimented with the plants they gathered, and eventually bred plants to possess
larger parts that humans could digest, especially seeds and roots. Animals also
were domesticated, especially mammals that could digest cellulose: cattle, sheep,
horses, goats, llamas, etc. Women also probably domesticated the first animals,
breastfeeding infant mammals that had been taken from their parents (that were
probably killed by humans). Large tracts of land could not support plants that
could provide human crops, due to climate, geology, elevation and the like, but
could support grasses and other cellulose-rich plants. Animals that could digest
such fare were domesticated, expanding the energy resources that humans could
exploit. Those animals were exploited in many ways. Horses and llamas became
a source of transportation. Cattle became a source of meat and leather, and could
also be put to work pulling a plow. Sheep and llamas could provide heat-conserving
wool, as well as meat.

In the Fertile
Crescent region, people began consuming the milk of cattle and goats. Today,
70% of the world’s adult humans cannot effectively
digest milk products. Those who can, however, have generally descended from
herders who ate milk products, so there has been a slight evolutionary adaptation,
although eating milk products is far from ideal. Many allergies and respiratory
problems are related to milk product consumption.

Earth
cannot support that many millions of people using the hunter-gatherer lifestyle,
because of digestible energy. The domestication of plants and animals allowed
humans to greatly increase their population densities. Fossil evidence shows,
however, that humans became smaller when they abandoned their hunter-gatherer lifestyles for
domesticated life. The domestication revolution began with humans having
poorer health than they formerly enjoyed. When people were hunter-gatherers,
they were always on the move, as no place could provide them the calories they
needed for long. Hence, possessions were minimal, largely limited to clothing,
gathering and food processing tools, and weapons. Human social conditions were
egalitarian, with very little hierarchy, as hunters lived in small bands, traveling
the land. As human populations filled up the available land, the bands became
competitive, and territories were carved out. People venturing into another band’s
territory could get killed. It is theorized that somewhere in the misty beginnings
of civilization, instead of killing a hunter from a rival band, the hunter was
compelled to serve the band that captured him. It was the beginning of slavery,
and may have been the beginning of civilization.
Harnessing the energy of others quite possibly began with the domestication of
plants and animals, as it created the “agricultural surplus” which has fueled
all civilizations.[5]

Harnessing human energy
can be more productive than harnessing animal energy, because humans possess high
intelligence and hands. Draft animals can digest the cellulose that humans cannot,
but do not have the intelligence or manipulative ability of humans, although they
are much stronger. Also, draft animals are edible, whereas no culture has ever
eaten people as a regular food source, at least that anthropologists are aware
of.[6] Slaves ate food that could feed
the masters, but their intelligence and manipulative ability could be put to tasks
that animals could not perform. However, slaves could harbor notions of freedom
that would be difficult to stifle. Brute force could keep the slaves subservient,
but in the long run would be difficult to maintain. Consequently, methods to teach
slaves to accept their condition were implemented from slavery’s very beginning,
and may have been the beginning of ideological indoctrination. If slaves accept
their condition, they are easier to control, which is partly why people born into
slavery, never knowing freedom, were easier to keep as slaves. In one form or
another, such indoctrination to convince the exploited to accept their position
continues to the present day. Without energy however, intelligence and manipulative
ability count for nothing.

About 40,000
years ago, as increasing technology led to the human superpredator, humanity began
altering earth’s environment. They ascended to the top of the food chain, killing
off large mammals that had no or few natural predators, and they killed competing
predators, as well as all other digestible animals. Wiping out other animals
created ecological dislocations, which has been a part of evolutionary activity
for eons. However, human intelligence and manipulative ability allowed humans
to take over earth’s ecosystems as no other animal ever had before. Killing off
large mammals and competing predators was probably humanity’s earliest large-scale
alteration of earth’s ecosystems. Such disruptions can lead to population explosions
and collapses of animals that were preyed upon, or depended on those missing creatures.

The most significant early
use of technology to begin creating the human-dominated ecosystem was probably
the introduction of fire as a vegetation-clearing tool. When Europeans
first came to the New World during the Columbian era, the natives of North
America’s eastern woodlands used fire annually to clear the forest of undergrowth,
creating an environment that was conducive to foraging deer and other preferable
animals. There is tantalizing evidence that the Great Plains of North America
may have been the world’s largest pasture, an environment created by millennia
of Indians burning the plains, to create an environment that encouraged bison,
elk, and deer to flourish. When the diseases and violence of invading Europeans
wiped out the natives, woodlands quickly reclaimed
the plains.[7]

Burning the vegetation
was apparently a sustainable practice, although it altered the landscape immensely,
and drove out certain species in favor of others. Far more significantly on a
global scale, humans began cultivating the earth to raise domesticated crops.
Sunlight that went into making the cellulose in trees was diverted to creating
sugars, starches, proteins and fats in domestic crops, as the forests were cleared
for crop production, and pastures for domestic animals. The trees were also used
for fuel, shelter and other civilized amenities. Deforestation accompanied the
earliest agriculture. Earth’s most deforested places are where “civilization”
first appeared on a large scale. Forest ecosystems are the greatest soil makers,
and wiping out forests has also wiped out soils, not only by erosion. Trees are
the greatest circulators of water in ground-based ecosystems, drawing water through
the roots and sending it to the atmosphere through their leaves, thus creating
a “suction.” Rainwater can percolate into the soil, in a great cycle that ecosystems
depend on. Killing off the trees killed off that circulation, leading to rising
groundwater and eventually soil salination. Without healthy soil, there are no
crops. Forests gave way to farms, and farms gave way to deserts. That has been
civilization in action, as human methods destroy the very environment that supports
life.[8]

In
some places, such as the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, diverted
water made the land capable of raising crops, at least for a time. Deforestation
and irrigation had long-term harmful effects, generally through soil destruction
and salination. Rivers that ran clearly before the domestication revolution became
clouded with silt, which was soil washed away downstream from deforested land.
Creating artificial environments to extract more of the sun’s energy carried with
it a great environmental cost. In more tropical lands, the soils usually had
less organic material in them than in temperate lands, and early agriculture in
the Fertile Crescent was disastrous. Sumeria, the world’s earliest known civilization,
began having serious soil salination problems within two thousand
years of establishment. By 2100 BC, Ur had abandoned wheat cultivation due to soil salinity,
and wheat only amounted to 2% of Sumerian crops. In 1990, Iraq, the seat of civilization,
imported 70% of its food. The people of the Nile river valley successfully engaged
in agriculture for thousands of years, but largely because silt from upstream
deforestation fertilized the land in the annual flood.

As
civilization began forming around the world, technology kept increasing in its
sophistication. People began working metals. Today, it is thought that copper
may have been the first worked metal, in about 10,000 BC. It was first used artistically.
Thousands of years later, it is thought, gold working
began. Gold was only useful for artwork, because it was so soft and pretty.
It later became currency, because it was so rare. All early use of each prehistorically
used metal seems to have been artistic. Practical uses were developed later.
The primitive fire pit became the hearth, and people eventually created sufficient
temperatures to separate metal from other elements in the ore, and metal smelting
began. Copper is thought to have been the first metal smelted, more than 6000
years ago. Copper has a melting point of nearly 2000°F, and until
humans created high enough temperatures in hearths, copper was obtained from discovered
nuggets.

Copper
is a relatively soft metal, and although copper
was made into weaponry as early as 5000 BC, it has serious limitations. Bronze
is an alloy of copper and other metals, and when copper-smelting cultures learned
to alloy other metals with copper, notably tin, then that culture graduated from
its Copper Age to its Bronze Age. Bronze is quite sturdy when compared to copper,
and weapons and tools made from bronze were superior. The Bronze Age began in
Sumeria by about 3500 BC, and the plow was invented about five hundred years later.
For about two thousand years, plows, tools and weapons were made of bronze in
the Fertile Crescent region. Plow agriculture is great at creating soil conditions
favorable for crop production, but also leads to rapid soil erosion, largely from
rain and wind. As agriculture and warfare flourished in the Fertile Crescent
region, technological advance also marched along, with the wheel being invented
in about 3500 BC, and Sumeria became the world’s first literate society in about
3000 BC. Written history then began.

With
civilization in the Fertile Crescent region, social stratification began. The
agricultural surplus allowed for human specialization. Professions developed,
with soldiers, priests, rulers, craftsmen, medical doctors and others appearing.
Much of what is “bad” about the human species came with the baggage of becoming
civilized. Along with specialization and innovation came classes of people who
dealt with ideas. Ideologies developed, and the rise of civilized ideology often
dealt with justifying the positions of the new elite classes, and those they exploited.
The Zero-Sum Game appeared, although it was not called that at the time. The
Zero-Sum Game, in the way I use it, is the idea that the only way to improve one’s
life was by exploiting others. Jared Diamond and others call the transition to
civilization the journey from egalitarianism to kleptocracy.
In one form or another, kleptocratic ideologies have survived to the present day.
Capitalism and nationalism, especially the
American variety, are little more than justifications
for enslaving the world’s people. The West also plunders their natural resources,
as today’s genocide in Iraq makes painfully clear. In
his Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote,

“In our time, political speech and writing
are largely the defense of the indefensible.”[9]

Little has changed since Orwell’s time. Not
all ideologists attempted to justify exploitation. Jesus and Buddha could be
considered ideologists (or even anti-ideologists, as they challenged their day’s
religious ideology). Adam Smith and Karl Marx both created economic ideologies that
attempted to assist humanity. Those men had enlightening things to say, but the
establishments erected in their names often had little to do with them, even turning
their visions upside down, as the establishments’ main concerns were amassing
and maintaining power (another energy concept), as full of self-servers
as they were, as all earthly establishments have proven to be.

As
humanity kept refining its ability to manipulate its environment, the blast furnace
and charcoal were created. Higher temperatures were achieved. In about 1400 BC, iron was first smelted in the Hittite culture,
which occupied today’s Turkey. Iron has a melting point of nearly 2800°F,
and early blast furnaces achieved the requisite temperature. Iron was more available
than the relatively scarce tin that was required to make the day’s bronze, and
its ability to hold an edge made iron a superior metal for tools and weapons.
The Hittites did not maintain their technological advantage for long, and by 1200
BC, about the time the Hittite Empire fell, iron weapons were appearing throughout
today’s Middle East. By about 1000 BC, the Celtic culture was making iron swords,
and they came to dominate most of Western Europe. At about the same time, the
Greeks learned how to create heat-treated iron weapons. Warfare became a bloodier
affair when iron weapons appeared. Iron plows and tools also allowed agriculture
to spread to lands previously considered too challenging to exploit. Warring
empires became the theme of early history, a theme that continues to this day.
Various cultures became intensely militaristic, such as Sparta’s and Assyria’s.

The struggles and hierarchies were all about
securing and consuming energy, and the agricultural and pastoral surplus was the
basis of it all. Hearths, kilns and furnaces were ways of refining the exploitation
of energy to gain better methods of manipulating the environment and each other,
to gain further energy security. Slavery was about exploiting human energy, intelligence
and manipulative ability. In various wars, the idea could simply be exterminating
the human inhabitants and taking their land and other wealth. The Jews secured
their Promised Land by outright genocide of its inhabitants, with their God’s
blessing (and demand), with Joshua’s army annihilating not only all of Jericho’s
inhabitants, but also all their livestock, and seizing
all their metal. That was also the logic behind the European/American
“settling” of North America, where they stole what may have been the world’s richest continent from its inhabitants,
while annihilating them. Even today, Christian sites on the Internet serve up
religious ideology to justify Joshua’s annihilation of Jericho’s inhabitants.

By about 1000 BC, humanity
began exploiting fossil fuel, as coal was used in China to make copper coins.
Before the Western Roman Empire fell, they began using coal, as evidence from
Britain has suggested.

Empires rose
and fell throughout the “known” world, i.e., Europe, northern Africa and the Fertile
Crescent. Those ideologies that began with civilization became quite abstract,
especially the religious ones, and Egypt was the first place that gold mining
was practiced on a large scale. The Egyptians had a sun god religion, with gold
reserved for royal use, as its symbol. The economic logic of the day demanded
that slaves be worked to death to obtain it. No Egyptian
slaves returned from those early gold mines. Their bones littered mines discovered
by modern archeologists. Human energy, intelligence and manipulative ability
were put to that use, and the fruit of those labors became seen in early civilization
as the universal measure of wealth. Gold became the ultimate currency. It was
really a symbol, not the real thing, but many early civilizations became mesmerized
by it, throwing away true wealth in pursuit of its symbol.

Eventually the Roman Empire made its ascendancy, and the environmental
deterioration of the Mediterranean region accelerated. As Rome conquered its
neighbors, Italy and Sicily were quickly deforested to meet Rome’s needs. After
Rome conquered Carthage, today’s Libya and vicinity was forced into becoming a
big farm. There was no single event that signified what happened, but centuries
of those practices rendered Libya the desert nation it is today. Rome helped
deforest the Middle East, the cedars of Lebanon becoming nearly extinct. Only
10% of the forest remains that used to run from Morocco to Afghanistan, and much
is desert today. The land’s ability to sustain life was destroyed in humanity’s
quest for usable energy. Whales were extinct in the Mediterranean by the time
the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Early civilization’s methods of extracting
useable energy were not sustainable and often cruel. Little has fundamentally
changed.

Rome was the ancient world’s
most refined practitioner of “Rape and Plunder Economics.” Exploiting the peoples
and lands of the continually growing empire was the whole point of the Roman Empire,
as with all empires. It does not matter if it is olive oil, furs, gold, timber,
wheat, fish or other goods; it nearly always boils down to energy.

Not all energy-exploitation systems were so hard on the immediate
environment. The world’s most sophisticated agricultural system, the paddy system,
was developed in China around 500 BC, and spread across Southeast Asia
during the next millennium. It was a more sustainable system than dry farming,
and its nitrogen-fixing feature, as well as the ability to recycle a great deal
of decaying animal and plant matter, allowed for greatly increased crop yields.
Southeast Asia’s human population always increased to the maximum available yield
of the agricultural system (the Malthusian dynamic), leaving most people on the
brink of starvation most of the time. The chinampas system of the Aztecs was
similar to the paddy system, helping keep Tenochtitlán
about the world’s cleanest city, as human waste from the city helped fertilize
the chinampas. The peoples along the Andes range of South America created an
amazing sustenance system in a hostile environment, through crop experimentation
(Machu Picchu may have partly been an agricultural laboratory, testing crops for
high-altitude agriculture[10]),
terracing, irrigation, high-altitude storage, fertilizer and other means.

No empire lasts forever, because either the
imperial activities exterminate the imperial subjects, as Spain’s
short-lived plunder in the New World demonstrated, or the environment becomes
so degraded that it cannot support human life any longer, as happened in Sumeria
(and neighboring empires invade and conquer declining empires), or the empire’s
victims rise up from within, overthrowing the imperial overlords (usually after
the empire has already severely declined). All earthly empires are primarily
exploitative, and they all had ideologues who conjured justifications for the
exploitation. In the earliest days, the rationales were often religious. Religious
rationales exist to the present day (early 2002), as the United States, the world’s first truly global empire, is targeting
Islamic people, with the current, unelected, “god-fearing”
American president calling the latest “war on terror” a “Crusade,” just as Roman Catholic
popes used to do. Religious rationales largely gave way to other ones, such as
racial (Europe’s plundering of Africa and the New World being apt
examples), social, ethnic, political, economic and “humanitarian,” etc. What all those
rationales really did, however, was justify exploitation and violence in order
to secure the energy of lands and peoples. They were all variations on
might makes right, and different ways of playing the Zero-Sum Game.

The Rise of Europe and Energy Exploitation

When
the Western Roman Empire fell in the 5th century AD, Europe reverted
back to a primarily agrarian state and entered what are called the Dark Ages.
The Eastern Roman Empire, however, flourished, and the rise of Islam in the 7th
century was a cultural awakening. Europe became backward, compared to the Middle
East. “Barbarians” who joined the Western Roman armies became the rulers of Dark
Ages Europe. Visigothic kings ruled today’s Spain (until the Muslim invasion
of 711) and parts of France. Frankish kings ruled over the parts of today’s France,
Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. Anglo-Saxons invaded the British Isles, and
the Ostrogoths invaded Italy. Carolingian kings from today’s Austria eventually
wrested the throne from the Frankish line, the most famous being Charlemagne,
who in 800 tried recreating the union of Church and State that characterized the
late Western Roman Empire. His attempt to recreate the Western Roman Empire failed,
but his empire became the direct ancestor of today’s France and Germany. Around
800, Vikings began invading continental Europe and the British Isles from Scandinavia.
Vikings also invaded and conquered the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, establishing
Russia and adopting Byzantine Christianity. The Normans descended from Vikings
who settled in today’s France, and the invasion of 1066 established their rule
in England.

The Catholic Church dominated
Europe, owning about a quarter of its land. It created a religious monopoly over
Western Europe, and the first Crusade that had its bloody climax in Jerusalem
in 1096 is considered Europe’s first united act, with knights and peasants from
France, Germany, Italy and England marching to the Holy Land via Constantinople.
As a warm-up for the First Crusade, the Christian armies perpetrated the first
great European Jew slaughters, in today’s France and Germany. Slaughtering Jews
became a European sport from that time forward. In 1056, the Christian “Reconquest”
of Spain from the Moorish rulers began, not reaching its completion until 1492.
Europe became a milieu of tension between Church and state, serf and lord, Christian
and non-Christian, and constantly warring states. Warfare became the European
way of life for the next millennium, and technological advances were often devoted
to weaponry and warfare.

With historical trends, there is interplay of culture, environment,
economics, politics, technology and other factors. The soul
age of the studied cultures should also be taken into account. The materialistic
West has yet to discover this. About the time Christian armies began “reconquering”
the Iberian Peninsula, Europe entered its High Middle Ages. Cities are devices
that concentrate energy. Every city survives by exploiting its hinterland, with
the agricultural surplus sustaining the cities. There is no exception to that
rule in world history. City dwellers, being freed from agricultural duties, then
learned specialized skills, and Europe’s great period of city building was the
High Middle Ages. Paris was rebuilt after the Viking invasions, and Notre Dame
Cathedral, for instance, began construction in 1163. The Romans founded London,
with the population declining when Roman rule ended. It was not until the Norman
invasion in 1066 that London began growing into the city it is today. Florence
began its rise to prominence in the late 1000s. Munich was founded in 1158.
Germanic peoples began invading Slavic Eastern Europe. Accordingly, northern
and central Europe began its great age of deforestation. About 75% of northern
and central Europe was deforested during the medieval period, and it accelerated
after 1050.[11]
Today, only about 25% of that forest remains. The trees provided fuel, building
material and made land available for crops and pastures. Marshes were drained,
and nearly everything was domesticated that could be. New plow technology enabled
exploitation of lands previously unavailable for cultivation. By 1200 however,
all the good land was under the plow, and increasingly marginal lands were exploited,
with the resultant environmental devastation that such methods always bring.

From the earliest days of civilization, the agricultural surplus
allowed the elite to pursue luxury items, indulging their senses and egos, usually
at the great expense of others. The pharaohs working
their slaves to death in Egypt’s gold mines is an early example. Conspicuous
wealth display and consumption has been a characteristic of the elites of probably
all societies for all of history. In Europe, obesity became a sign
of wealth. Early humans stole the fur of their fellow mammals, taking advantage
of its heat-conserving ability, and as Europeans became more affluent, fashion
became a factor.[12]
The fur supply and markets were originally local, but as it became a business,
fur centers developed, such as the one at Kiev. By 1240, when the Mongol hordes
destroyed Kiev, there was hardly a fur-bearing animal to be found in the surrounding
valley. Fur-bearing animals were largely driven to extinction in Europe by the
16th century, and the last untrapped region was exploited: Siberia.
The demand for fur drove the Russians to expand eastward, eventually to California.
The early allure of northern North America for Europe was the fur trade. Beginning
on the Atlantic side of North America, the fur trade largely exterminated fur-bearing
animals east of the Mississippi River by 1800, and the European fur rush met,
coming from both directions, in the Pacific Northwest. The demand for fur finally
circled the globe. A great deal was simply for fashion.

Northern
and Central Europe had an advantage over the Fertile Crescent, Middle East and
Mediterranean region in that its soils contained more organic matter, and were
more resilient than those more southerly soils. Nevertheless, Europe will look
like those southern desert lands one day, if the current methods of extracting
environmental energy continue their use. That plunder of Europe’s lands resulted
in a great increase in human population, growing from about 36 million in 1000
to 80 million in 1300. Also, the world’s climate was relatively warm from 900
to about 1200, allowing agriculture on lands previously unsuited for it.

European technology began advancing again with
the rise of European cities, as did new social institutions. Armor began improving
during the High Middle Ages. The fully armored knight, charging on his horse
with his lance under his arm, came into being during the 11th century.
Crossbows began improving, to overcome the better armor. Crusades became a European
constant after the first one in 1096. In order to preserve its religious monopoly,
Pope Innocent III declared a Crusade on France to wipe out Catharism in the early 1200s, which killed about one
million people, and was Europe’s first great religious war.

The
Chinese invented and used gunpowder, but only for firecrackers, and used it several
hundred years before Europeans did. Gunpowder began to be used in European warfare
just before the Black Death epidemic of the 1340s. Gunpowder was a way to get
an explosive burst of energy, in order to kill more effectively.

Europe’s High Middle Ages,
which ended during the 1300s, were partly made possible by a global warming trend
(making more energy available) that lasted from about 900 to the late 1200s,
peaking between 1100 and 1250.[13]
It was a great period of deforestation, agriculture and population explosion.
By 1300, all the easily cultivated land was under the plow, marginal lands were
being exploited, and earth began cooling. The good times were over, and Europe
was at its Malthusian limit. Europe constantly hovered on the brink of famine.
In 1314 a major famine hit Europe, lasting until 1317. Northern Europeans ate
cats and dogs during that famine. As is typical in history, when the pressures
of lack of available energy (hunger) are keenly felt, people become violent.
France and England began their Hundred Years’ War in 1337, fighting over control
of land. In the midst of the fighting and starving came the plague.

The
Black Death probably originated in China, and swept across Asia, via the trade
routes, hitting Europe in 1347. It is estimated that it killed between a quarter
and a third of all those in its path, with estimates of up to half of Europe dying
off. Europeans took vengeance on Jews, lepers and other social outcasts for “bringing
the plague,” and tens of thousands died from mob violence. Art became obsessed
with death. Works depicting the danse macabre made their appearance.
The four horsemen of the apocalypse were riding during those years, and the fourteenth
century was one of unending calamity in Europe.[14]
When the century came to a close with another visit of the plague in 1399, Europe’s
population may have been as low as half of what it had been in 1300.

Gradually,
Europe’s population grew, and recovered to its 1300 levels during the 1500s.
A cultural awakening, which eventually became known as the Renaissance, began
in the late 1300s in northern Italy’s city-states. Probably the most significant
Renaissance outcome was the advent of humanism and the eventual undermining of
Roman Catholic authority. The Cathars formed the first threat to Catholic religious
hegemony in Europe, and the cultural awakening of the Renaissance eventually brought
forth Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. Concurrent with that cultural
awakening was the advent of the “Little Ice Age,” which lasted from about 1430
to 1850. Winters became severe in Europe, and growing seasons shortened, with
glaciers growing, rivers freezing over and Europe continually living on the cusp
of disaster.

The
British Isles are an illustrative microcosm of what Europe eventually did to the
world. The British Isles have been the scene of successive invasions. The Cro-Magnon
and Neanderthal people lived there during the last ice age, and when that ice
age ended about 12,000 years ago, the British Isles became islands, separated
from mainland Europe. Iberian people settled the British Isles by 3000 BC and
farmed the land. The Picts migrated to Scotland in about 1000 BC, and to Ireland
in 200 AD. During the first millennium BC, the Celtic people overran Western
Europe and also invaded the British Isles, displacing/absorbing the Iberian and
Pictish peoples. The Picts battled the Romans, who invaded and conquered England
in 54 BC. Hadrian’s Wall began construction
in 122 AD, to keep the Picts of Scotland out of England. When the Western Roman
Empire collapsed, the Germanic Anglo-Saxon peoples next invaded the British Isles.
Beginning around 800 AD, the Vikings began invading the British Isles and northern
continental Europe. The Vikings drove the Irish from the seas, and the Irish
were never again a seafaring people.[15] They also settled in northern France and became
the Normans (from “Norsemen”). The Normans invaded the British Isles in 1066,
setting up the rule of Norman kings in England. Those events led to the Hundred
Years’ War, and nearly continual war with France for centuries.

The
British Isles were steeped in invasion and warfare. Also, all non-human competitors
for energy were driven from the scene, beginning with competing predators. By
900 AD, the brown bear was nearly extinct in the British Isles. In 1486, the
last wolf was sighted in England. The wolf was last sighted in Wales in 1576,
and the last one in Scotland in 1743. With competing predators exterminated,
attention turned to competitors for crops. In 1533, the English Parliament passed
a law requiring churches to have nets to catch crows and other birds. In 1566,
churches were authorized to pay a bounty on a wide array of birds and mammals.
In 1668, John Worlidge’s calendar demonstrated the English attitude toward animals
that were “harmful” to agriculture. In February, killing all snails, frogs and
tadpoles was the task. In June, it was destroying ants, and in July it was killing
wasps and flies.[16]
The crane became extinct in Britain during the 1500s, as did the beaver. There
were walruses on the Thames as late as 1456. The great auk, which once blanketed
North Atlantic Islands, and was the Northern Hemisphere’s version of the penguin,
began being hunted in the 1500s for food, and was rendered extinct in 1844. The
global whale rush also began in the 1500s, nearly
rendering extinct what is possibly earth’s only other sentient species.

England was largely deforested
by the 1500s, and then Elizabethan England needed ships to join the global empire game that Europe was beginning
to play. England’s solution was to invade Ireland
and chop down its forests to build its navy. Ireland has yet to recover its forest.
All these activities can be seen as involved with gaining/preserving energy by
using trees for fuel and structure, using that newly denuded land to raise crops,
killing off all animal competitors for that crop energy, and consuming energy
by eating all those animals.

The
Carboniferous Period likely laid down great coal deposits in what became Northern
and Central Europe, North America, and eastern Asia. Europeans began mining that
great source of energy during the 13th century. Coal provided
household heat, fuel for blacksmiths, and eventually powered the Industrial Revolution.
Coal is a rocklike substance, and burning coal not only produced carbon dioxide
and water, but coal also contained sulfur and other elements.

Before
the British Isles were completely deforested, coal began replacing wood as fuel.
Coal smoke from the local vicinity drove Queen Eleanor from Nottingham Castle
in 1257. By 1307, coal burning was banned in London, but the edict was ignored.[17] The human world’s first great
air pollution came from burning coal, and by the 1600s, residents of London, with
its perpetual cloud of coal smoke, had more respiratory disease than the rest of the world combined. Today, China is
the great coal-burning nation (as well as the greatest tobacco smoking nation),
so, as might be expected, China has more respiratory problems than any other nation.
Air pollution is still a great killer of children worldwide, nearly all caused
by energy-producing activities.

Europe’s first imperial ventures were about acquiring native
land and the fruit of native labor. Marco Polo spent the late 1200s in the court
of Kublai Khan, and brought back his amazing tale to Venice. It is thought today
that people have used spice largely to better
preserve food (by killing bacteria), again an energy concept, and it also made
preserved food taste better, as dead food loses it flavor. Venice had a virtual
monopoly on the European spice trade, and charged exorbitant prices. In 1453,
Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, ending the Eastern Roman Empire, which
never completely recovered from being sacked in 1204 by its European “allies”
during the Fourth Crusade. With the Turks newly in control of the spice trade
route to Europe, Portugal and Spain began
seeking new routes.

Portugal
had already been expanding its domain when the Turks conquered Constantinople.
Sugar first came to Europe as Arab traders brought it to Moorish Spain. Portugal
began colonizing the uninhabited Madeira Islands in 1418. They immediately turned
the islands into sugar plantations. Sugar provided two things: calories and sweetness.
Similar to the spices, sugar helped provide useful calories, but more importantly,
it played to humanity’s ape heritage of eating fruit: the sweet tooth. Refined
sugar is an addictive substance and disastrous to health, arguably being the single
greatest cause of tooth decay and also the single
greatest cause of diabetes, as well as contributing to obesity.[18] European teeth
really began rotting when refined sugar became
a mainstay. Before civilization made its appearance, tooth decay was rare.

On the very first day he met the New World’s
natives, Columbus observed that those friendly natives would make good Christians
and slaves, and he captured six natives that
first day. The Christian/slave dynamic would figure largely in Spain’s
imperial foray into the New World. Columbus’ very name translated to “Christ-bearing
colonizer,” and he called himself the “Christ bearer” immediately after his
first voyage. Practice and theory, or reality and rhetoric, were on nearly opposite
ends of the spectrum, however. Española, where Europeans first colonized the
New World, became history’s only instance of complete genocide of millions of people, as the
Greater Antilles’ inhabitants were extinct well within a century after “discovery.”
Although Columbus would write about his desire to convert the natives, his
main preoccupation was becoming rich by forcing the natives to mine gold. Columbus
literally thought that gold was the ticket to heaven. There was little
Renaissance humanism to be found in Columbus’ practices.

The
first twenty years of Spanish presence in the New World was an unmitigated and
genocidal disaster for the natives, with millions dying. Enslaving the natives
was the standard Spanish practice, although plenty of semantic games were played.
Officially, slavery was outlawed for “friendly” natives, when it became obvious
that they quickly died upon being shipped to Spain’s slave markets. So, the New
World’s natives were enslaved and put to work locally, to turn them into “good
Christians.” The Spanish experience during the early years of the New World’s
“discovery” is history’s only era when people were regularly used as food, as
the Spanish used the natives as dog food.[19]
Native Americans had few domestic animals, so the natives themselves were the
most available meat, and the soft bodies of native infants made for a canine delicacy.
The exploitation and waste of human energy was prodigious during those
days, as it was seemingly limitless.

As
mining operations declined because the natives were so numerically reduced and
the easy gold was gone, sugar became the primary export
from the New World’s tropics, which is concentrated, addictive energy.
From northern North America the fur trade flourished (for energy conservation
and fashion), which drove fur-bearing animals to extinction. From temperate North
America came tobacco, the export that funded the English colonies in Virginia
and southward. In 1638, three million pounds of tobacco per year made its way
from present-day Virginia to Europe. It reached 17 million pounds in 1672, the
same year that American whaling became an industry,
largely to obtain the energy-rich whale oil. Tobacco was different from
sugar in that it had no beneficial health effects as Europeans used it,
being solely an addictive substance, the deadliest consumer good that humanity
has seen. As early as 1604, King James I was campaigning against tobacco consumption,
noting its deleterious health effects, among other unsavory aspects of its use.

As with sugar, tobacco was raised with slave
labor, and both crops depleted soil fertility. Everywhere the Europeans showed
up, whether it was Africa, Australia, the New World or the South Pacific, the
effect on the natives was disastrous and/or genocidal. The only partial exception
was Asia, partly because the natives were better armed and did not fall prey to
European diseases.

The Renaissance
helped lead to the rise of science in Europe, and waning Church
influence. Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, first published in 1543, heralded
the rise of Western Science, although the Catholic Church fought fiercely against
it, as well as the Protestant Reformation, for generations. During the 1600s,
telescopes, microscopes, higher mathematics and other tools came into use, and
technology began vastly improving. In the early 1700s, Englishman
Abraham Darby developed a scientific understanding of brass making and invented
coke smelting, using coal to forge brass and iron. It led to a great increase
in demand in coal use, and many metallurgical advances. Science and technology
interacted. Warfare became a prominent use of technological advances, as Europeans
continually jostled for power.

When
Europeans invaded North America (the English most
prominently), they stumbled into one of the world’s
greatest reservoirs of wealth. Eastern North America was almost entirely
forested, and it was a human-friendly forest, open and park-like, as the natives
burned the undergrowth each year, fostering game for hunting, such as deer. The
soils were intact, and agriculture was performed in an environmentally gentle
way. The Ohio River ran blue before the white man showed up. The Great Plains may have been another artificially husbanded environment,
creating earth’s greatest herds.

Europe
plundered North America’s real wealth with a vengeance that may have no historical
equal. The Spanish New World experience during
the 1500s exploited human effort for no real wealth gain, but ultimately the wealth
is in the environment. The Spanish did not alter their New World domains as drastically
as the English and Americans altered North America. Eastern North America was
95% deforested by the invaders, completely exterminating the passenger
pigeon, which probably numbered five billion birds before the deforestation
and slaughter began. When the woodlands were decimated for fuel, housing and
to clear virgin soils for agriculture, coal mining began in earnest, and the Great
Plains were ravaged in another prodigious display of destruction. The bison were
reduced from 40 to 60 million animals to 23 wild ones in less than a century.
The white man did not get around to invading the Pacific Northwest until 150 years
ago, and for that reason the Northwest probably has the most intact ecosystems
in the continental United States, although that is relative. I have hiked through
the few remaining unlogged river valleys in the Cascades, and pondering what Western
Washington looked like before the white man showed up is an awe-inspiring experience.

Not only is there evidence
that the Great Plains may be at least partly an artificial construction, but there
is also evidence that the Amazon rain forest may be the world’s largest garden,
with the land terraformed millennia ago, turning a rather human-unfriendly environment
into earth’s most diverse and fecund land-based ecosystem.[20] It appears that the Pacific Northwest
Culture, which stretched from Alaska to California, was probably humanity’s first
large-scale sedentary culture. The salmon spawning runs were a form of energy
delivery, taking sunlight that fell on the Pacific Ocean, working its way
up the food chain, to be finally delivered directly to the natives’ villages.
A pipeline could not have done it more effectively. Because of the salmon-based
economy (sea mammals provided the fur), the world’s first environmentally stable
civilization flourished. They did not need to chop down their forests to divert
the sun’s energy to raising crops, and when the white man finally got around to
plundering that part of the world, the trees they chopped down were tremendous.

It may not have always been the Rape
and Plunder Economy in historical times. The relationship to nature that the
Native Americans often manifested may have been a result of a spiritual maturity
that the Old World’s people had not achieved. North America and large parts of
the New World may have been relatively intact not so much because Native Americans
were “behind” the Old World in their development, but they had wisdom in relating
to nature that was missing in the Old World. The nature-based religions of the
Native Americans are evidence of it. It may have to do with soul
age and other factors unrecognized by mainstream science.

Also,
their relatively hostile environment may have helped hone the Old World’s mentality,
especially Europe’s. The Puritanical attitude and the Protestant work ethic may
have partly derived from the fact that people living in poor conditions, with
severe seasons, had to make hay while the sun shined or they would not survive
the winter. There may be a negative feedback effect where humans would continually
stress their environment through uncontrolled breeding and environmentally-destructive
practices, which in turn made for harsh times, which made people’s outlooks harsher,
greedy and more prone to violence. I once asked Hinono
what the European rape of the world was all about, as nothing happens by accident
(in the mystical perspective), and he said it was about “the dilution
of bad ideas,” as if Europe was about to become a spiritual black hole unless
the “pressure” was released.

About
the same time that English colonies in North America became restless, England
began conquering Asia, beginning with what may have been the world’s richest region,
Bengal, as far as readily plunderable wealth went.
The triumvirate of energy, intelligence and manipulative ability in wealth
creation was starkly evident in England’s rape of Bengal. Bengal had a thriving
textile industry, and England imposed a mercantile exploitation from the beginning,
actually amputating the thumbs of weavers so they could no longer manufacture
fabric. After several years of English rule, a drought-caused famine (greatly
aided by English destruction of the society, famine
accompanied English rule in India) killed off a third of Bengal’s peasantry.
The country was forced into growing raw materials such as jute and indigo for
English factories and consumption, and opium for China. India became a major
raw material exporter. Tea sweetened with sugar is an imperial drink, as is coffee
and hot chocolate. The Europeans plundered Africa in the late 19th century, with
similar dynamics.

The
Industrial Revolution and the Science of Energy

In
retrospect, the major event of the 1700s was James Watt’s invention of the modern
steam engine in 1769. It was a great improvement over the Newcomen steam engine
that was first developed in 1712, as it had a steam condenser, making it vastly
more efficient. Watt’s engine made the Industrial Revolution possible. With
steam engines, energy could be harnessed at a level never before dreamed of.
The invention of the modern steam engine coincided with the beginnings of the
anti-slavery movement in Europe. Machines could perform labor that humans formerly
did.

The Industrial Revolution is one
where theory lagged behind practice. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
did not invent capitalism, but formalized an ideological framework that unwittingly
prepared the conditions for dogma to take root. Similarly, the steam engine was
powering the Industrial Revolution long before the theory was developed to explain
it. Capitalism was born in England, and the modern state was born in France.
One could be considered economic and the other political, but the two have never
been truly separated. Disciplines that attempt that extractive surgery, such
as “realism,” which tries separating politics from economics, analyzing politics
separately, can fail spectacularly. Economic and political activities are about
amassing and controlling energy; it is no accident that the word “power”
describes political “wealth.” Terms such as “political capital” demonstrate that
“political-economic” is a more appropriate term than either one by itself. Political
power derives from economic power, and violence has accompanied the garnering
of economic power since the earliest days of humanity. In the United
States, history’s most materialistic nation, money dominates politics, with
all politicians at the national level being essentially owned by the interests
that fund their campaigns.

Ever since humans began making machines, attempts were made to
make them independent of fuel. All manner of “perpetual motion” devices were
dreamed up. None ever worked. When Napoleon tried conquering his corner of the
world, forcing the Enlightenment onto his neighbors, a military engineer in his
service was Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot, whose military strategies won every
battle that he planned. Carnot also was a mathematician who helped develop the
mathematical basis for the reason why a perpetual motion machine was impossible.
His son was also a soldier, and Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, known as Sadi today,
took his father’s work further, and in 1824 published his conception of the perfect
engine, 55 years after Watt’s steam engine made its appearance. When Carnot published
his seminal work, heat had only recently been scientifically described. Before
the work of Antoine Lavoisier, European scientists thought that combustion was
the release of a substance called phlogiston. Lavoisier, before his neck met
the business end of a guillotine in 1794, demonstrated that combustion was due
to oxygen reacting with the combusted material. In 1798 and
1799, Benjamin Thompson and Humphry Davy demonstrated that heat transfer was an
exchange of energy, similar in concept to work being done, and that idea
eventually displaced the old theories.

Carnot’s
theory on his ideal heat engine would become known as the second law of thermodynamics,
introducing the concept of entropy. Just as theory lagged behind practice, the
second law preceded the first, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed
(and the “zeroth,” which defines temperature, sort of). The term thermodynamics
defines the essence of the science; dealing with the relationship between temperature
(thermo) and motion (dynamics). The crux of Carnot’s theory is that hot things
cool off, giving their heat to the surrounding environment.

Carnot
theorized that the temperatures it operated between determined a heat engine’s
maximum possible efficiency. According to Carnot's theory, the hotter an engine
ran, the greater percentage of its consumed energy could be converted to work.
Today, calculating the maximum possible efficiency of a heat engine is performed
by using the temperatures of the heat source and exhaust medium. The heat source
and exhaust medium are known as “heat sinks” in thermodynamics jargon. The formula
is known as Carnot’s equation, and the maximum possible efficiency is the temperature
difference between the two heat sinks. See the diagram below.

The
(T1-T2)/T1 formula is learned by all thermodynamics students in their first week
of class. Putting in some real numbers shows what Carnot’s equation means. In
today’s electric companies, a coal-fired power plant generates about 2000°
F in its boiler, where water is made into high-temperature steam. After the steam
is run through turbines, a large body of water cools it back down into liquid
water, so it can be reintroduced into the boiler. That is also the essence of
Watt’s steam engine, and the introduction of the steam condenser was what allowed
the Industrial Revolution to take off.

If
the body of water that cools the condenser is 55° F, the arithmetic
works out to 80% efficiency, and the calculation is at this footnote.[21]

That
means that for every 100 units of heat introduced at the boiler, the turbines
will produce 80 units of mechanical energy, at most. In reality however, the
steam turbine’s thermal efficiency will be far less than 80%. Today, the national
average for heat engine efficiency at the electric companies is about 30%. The
highest thermal efficiencies obtained by state-of-the-art equipment is about 40%,
or about half the Carnot ideal. The research on gaining higher efficiencies is
largely devoted to developing boiler and turbine materials that can withstand
higher temperatures. The “visionaries” in the field think that 4000°
F boiler temperatures can be reached in the next generation, and 60% thermal efficiencies
may be attainable.

As I first began
studying thermodynamics in the late 1980s, I wondered where Carnot's equation
came from. It turns out to be quite simple. There is a process that reverses
the heat engine dynamic, and it is called a heat pump. Where a heat engine takes
advantage of the differential between heat sink temperatures to produce mechanical
energy, a heat pump uses mechanical energy to move heat between two heat sinks.
Take those steam turbine temperatures and imagine a heat pump operating within
those parameters. The heat pump would take heat from the 55° F heat
sink and raise its temperature to 2000° F, by using mechanical energy.
That might seem nonsensical at first, but that is what heat pumps do. Using those
temperatures and inverting the Carnot equation, the maximum theoretical heat pump
efficiency is developed. See the diagram below.

Inserting
the previous temperatures into that equation, we get 1.25.[22]
That means that for every 100 units of mechanical energy that is put into the
heat pump, 125 units of heat will be moved from the 55° F heat sink
and delivered to the 2000° F heat sink, at most. That ratio of 1.25
is known as a coefficient of performance (COP).[23]
Combining both Carnot equations is what makes Carnot’s theory clear. See the
diagram below.

Combining
the equations yields a result of one. In that ideal Carnot arrangement, all of
the mechanical energy that was farmed from the system in the heat engine was used
to drive the heat pump, taking the heat from the lower heat sink and depositing
it back into the high temperature heat sink. In that ideal world, the perfect
heat engine could be hooked up to the perfect heat pump, and it would run forever
on its own energy. In the real world, however, hot always goes to cold, and there
are always heat losses from any system where heat is converted to work. As shown
above, the electric company only gets about half the Carnot ideal in practice,
and heat pumps get far less than half the Carnot ideal. Instead of 80% x 1.25
= 100%, it is more like 40% X 0.2 = 8%. The 8% number means that in reality,
only 8% of the energy farmed from the boiler by the heat engine would make its
way back to the boiler to start the cycle again. The other 92% would be largely
lost to heat losses, so the majority of energy released by burning fuel would
simply be vented to the environment, creating thermal pollution. Electrical power
plants, for instance, are notorious for warming up the bodies of water that are
used to condense the steam.

Steam turbines
at electric companies work by a simple principle. Liquid water is turned into
a high-temperature steam at the boiler, its newly liberated molecules rocketing
at immense velocities, and then directed at a turbine blade. The energy exchanged
during the collision of the water molecule and turbine blade is how the heat energy
of the boiler is converted into mechanical energy. It is no different in essence
from using my muscles to push my car down the road, or a river pushing a waterwheel.
In the case of the steam turbine, it is a high-velocity water molecule banging
against a turbine blade.

The heat pump
requires a little more explanation. When Carnot came up with his famous equation,
heat pumps did not exist. They only existed in theory. They have since been
invented and have been put to many uses. The heat pump application that all Americans
are familiar with is the household refrigerator. It removes heat from inside
the cold refrigerator and dumps it into the warm kitchen, moving the heat from
a cold heat sink to a higher temperature one. A brief description of how a refrigerator
works is at this footnote.[24]

Physicists
have asked if thermodynamics had more debt to the steam engine than the steam
engine had to thermodynamics. With Watt’s steam engine coming onto the scene,
the West entered the age of machines. The motive power of steam could be harnessed
in many ways. Richard Trevithick built the first locomotive in 1804. In 1807,
Robert Fulton made his famous steamboat run up the Hudson River. Railroads and
steamships began crossing the globe.

The
forerunners to modern factories began development in England in the early 1700s,
in the textile industry. England’s rape of Bengal
boosted its industrial advance at India’s expense. Machines for transportation
and manipulation became feasible with the steam engine, and England’s textile
factories no longer needed to be situated next to rivers, to take advantage of
river power. In 1814 the first cotton mill was built, in Waltham Massachusetts.
Raw cotton entered, and finished goods emerged. In the early days of factory
textile production, women were hired to work in them, partly because they could
be paid less than men. It is not an accident that the women’s suffrage movement,
the communist movement, and efforts to abolish slavery began in those early days
of industrialization. With the ability to exploit energy on a scale never
before dreamed of, strong backs and hands were no longer as necessary for the
creation of human-usable wealth. Wage slavery eventually replaced chattel slavery.
Slave owners made the case that people do not take care of things they rent as
well as things they own. Their arguments were not easily dismissed, and the world
of Charles Dickens came from the Industrial Revolution. In England, the advent
of industrial capitalism was a disaster for the masses, as life expectancy fell
during the late 18th century, in the hellish conditions of early industrialization.
A rich, fat capitalist class developed, while the lower classes labored in horrific
conditions, in the factories and mines, with children and women working in virtual
slavery.

In
the United States, wood was the first fuel exploited, as it was so readily abundant.
As the trees quickly disappeared, Americans reverted to coal, just as the English
had done. As far as nature’s “wealth bank” went, burning trees was the use of
sunlight that had fallen on the tree during the years that it grew, while coal
was the exploitation of sunlight captured by plants hundreds of millions of years
ago (or if Gold is right, energy put there at earth’s creation,
and not renewable). Because such a rich continent was plundered, the United States
quickly reached the world’s highest standard of living, living easily off the
land, while exterminating its former inhabitants, as well as incredible numbers
of passenger pigeons, and later bison. As Carl Sauer
remarked, all that so-called wealth creation was actually wealth consumption,
draining the world’s real wealth. Brian O’Leary
stated it succinctly one day when he said there could be no economy on a planet
that cannot support life.

The
Industrial Revolution is seen as the most important event in human history since
the Agricultural Revolution. Mechanized farming eliminated the need for farmers.
In the 1830s, the American John Deere began making steel plows, and the American
Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper. By the late 19th century, heat-engine-powered
machines replaced teams of horses and oxen. The Dickensian world has not quite
disappeared. It has partly been exported from the West to sweatshop factories
abroad, in places such as Indonesia, where people work in virtual slavery for
Western corporations, making clothing for Americans and other Westerners.

The “agricultural surplus”
allowed for specialization of labor. In “primitive” societies, nearly everybody
was involved in food production. As agricultural systems became more efficient,
from a human standpoint (not for the exterminated “pests” or the depleted soils
and ecosystems), the surplus grew, and fewer people were needed for food production.
Long before the Industrial Revolution, England developed the most efficient agricultural
systems, yet even on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, about half of England’s
workforce was engaged in agriculture. Although the United States was the worlds’
most industrialized nation when the Great Depression of the 1930s arrived, about
a third of the workforce was still engaged in agriculture. That number is 3%
today. Today’s Western Civilization is possible because of energy exploitation,
but it is still a Zero-Sum Game being played, with the rise of new ideologies
to justify the positions of the capital and
elite classes. The craziness of ideology was not confined to political-economic
activities. The growing scientific establishment was intimately involved.

The Energy Racket Takes Shape

Before
the Industrial Revolution, economics was a Zero-Sum Game and land was the primary
basis of wealth. In Spain, a few rich families owned most of the land. In England,
a similar manifestation of greed was taking shape. In Spain, the great sheep
herds of the grandees overran Spain, devastating Spanish farms and helping to
make Spain as arid as it is. In England in the 16th century, rich
landowners began fencing in the land and kicking the peasants off it. The movement
was known as “Enclosure,” and helped spur the English
invasion of North America. Enclosure was a way for landowners to kick the
peasants off land that they lived off, and turn a profit using the land for either
sheep pasturage or saleable crops. Enclosure riots punctuated 16th
and 17th century England, and helped lead to the English Civil War,
which began in 1640.[25]
In England, the evolution of first wiping out predatory competitors for energy,
then agricultural “pests,” and then humans themselves, is evident.

Capitalism
was born in England, due to a confluence of geography, culture, technology, and
unique historical trends. When Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations
in 1776, capitalism already existed, although that name would not be used until
the 20th century. Ellen Meiksins Wood and other Marxist historians
have documented the long process of England’s transformation from feudalism to
capitalism, and Wood shows how it grew from the rural agrarian milieu of greedy
landowners, not the urban factory.[26]
Adam Smith is associated with the “invisible hand of competition” and the notion
that everybody pursuing their narrow self-interest, competing against each other,
would make life better for everybody. That concept is a cornerstone of today’s
corporate capitalism, but Smith had little
to do with it. Smith was an Enlightenment philosopher, and to him, more important
than his Wealth of Nations was his The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
which he had reprinted several times during his lifetime. The very first sentence
of Moral Sentiments states:

“How
selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his
nature, which may interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness
necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing
it.”[27]

Greed was not a virtue in Smith’s perspective. Scholars
familiar with Smith’s corpus agree that he would be aghast at today’s corporate
capitalism, and would be particularly horrified that he is considered its father.
Today’s capitalism bears far more resemblance to Charles Darwin’s vision than
Smith’s. Darwin theorized that from the “war of nature,” with everything in competition,
comes progress.[28] Darwin’s theories were partly
a projection of the English mind onto what he saw in nature.

England
industrialized on the workers’ backs, and partly by raping India. With Watt’s
steam engine, coal became the Industrial Revolution’s fuel, because the British
Isles and Europe had mineable coal and the trees were gone. The famous London
Fog was not true fog, but coal smoke. Pictures from European urban life in the
early 20th century are readily obtainable today. Everybody is soot-stained
in the pictures. London was bathed in a pall of coal smoke from the 1600s to
the 1900s, and eventually all of urban Europe looked the same. As with Britain,
European invaders first razed eastern North America’s forests, as well as exterminating
its human inhabitants. While that was happening, they also hunted
the world’s whales to the brink of extinction, mainly for the whale’s energy-rich
oil. As those resources became scarce, the United States also sat on mineable
coal, and coal mining eventually dominated Appalachia’s economy.

New
kinds of empires were built in those early days of capitalism and industrialization.
Britain was in the early lead, being more than twice as industrialized as France
and nearly twice as much as the United States in 1830.[29] By 1860, Britain
was three times as industrialized as France and the United States, and nearly
six times as industrialized as the Hapsburg Empire. The year 1860 marked the
beginning of the United States’ great leap forward as compared to its imperial
rivals. As usual, warfare initiated the “progress.” The American Civil War was
the most devastating war in American history.

On
the brink of the Civil War, American whaling was in decline, because whales
were nearly extinct. In 1859 in Pennsylvania, Edwin Drake drilled the first
American oil well, and the oil industry began. In the early days of the industry,
oil was used for “medicine,” and because whale oil was becoming scarce as lamp
oil, petroleum quickly replaced whale oil in the United States. The Civil War
was also the first great era of American war profiteering. A class of men known
as “robber barons” all got their starts during the Civil War, building new kinds
of empires. Corporate capitalism was a new political-economic form. Today, corporations
only exist to make money for the owners, an idle class that skims
off the cream. Also, the Industrial Revolution, with its exploitation of energy
on a scale never before seen, moved the concept of wealth further from early concepts
of controlling land and labor. Controlling energy sources eventually became
an overriding imperative.

The
robber barons got their start during the Civil War,
and the fledgling industries all came under the control of a few people, each
industry turning into a racket. Empires in steel, banking,
railroads and others were built during those days. The most successful robber
baron of all, however, was John Rockefeller. As with the other robber barons,
Rockefeller avoided military service during the Civil War and, after careful inspection,
entered the oil industry in 1863. Rockefeller, the son of a snake oil salesman,
realized that if he could control the industry’s refining arm, he would control
the entire industry, as all oil would have to pass through his hands on its way
to market. It was a gatekeeper concept. Soon after he entered the industry,
he embarked on a strategy of buying out or wiping out all of his competitors -
the hundreds of small refiners that dotted the northeastern United States. By
1880, Rockefeller controlled 95% of U.S. refining. Rockefeller personified a
new, ingenious ruthlessness in American industry.

The
decades after the Civil War became known as The Gilded Age, with the robber barons
ridding the new industries of competitors and creating vast economic empires,
empires that still exist. By the early 20th century, monopolies dominated
the American economy, and the era of “trust-busting” was supposed to loosen the
stranglehold that a few capitalists had over the American economy. The trust-busting
activity had limited effectiveness. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was broken up
into a few large oil companies, but the oil companies colluded behind the scenes,
and the world’s largest oil companies were known as the “seven sisters.” Two
of those Rockefeller oil companies merged back together recently, forming the
world’s largest corporation, Exxon Mobil (the neocolonial Wal Mart has now exceeded
them in revenues).

Corporate power soon
dominated America’s political-economic environment. As robber barons such as
Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Astor, Harriman and friends
consolidated their empires, they often turned to “philanthropy,” a strange term
to use for those men, and their philanthropy became a means of social engineering
and control, and diversifications of their empires. In the early 20th
century, Rockefeller and Carnegie’s foundations, working with the American Medical
Association, used their “philanthropy” to entrench what became today’s
medical racket. The hegemony became ideological, as Rockefeller established
the University of Chicago, which has created
the ideology that dominates today’s economic theory, favoring the capitalistic
perspective.

The lies
told to American children nearly begin in the cradle. If people can be brainwashed
while they are young and impressionable, just forming their personalities and
core beliefs, they will largely be unable to critically examine them for the rest
of their lives. Today, major corporations are trying to form brand loyalty in
children (such as the late 20th century’s Joe Camel campaign to addict
children to cigarettes), so they will have
customers for life. It is that way in every ideological endeavor, and no different
in science, which prides itself in the exercise of reason and observation. Similar
to the American media’s self-serving pretense that it is objective, the scientific
establishment characterizes its membership as being open-minded, seeking scientific
truth.

Science and the "Real World"

One
of history’s greatest physicists, Max Planck, stated,

"a
new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them
see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation
grows up that is familiar with it."[30]

Semmelweis,
the pioneer of sterile medical practices, died in an insane asylum. Those who
discovered anesthesia died penniless. The pioneers of
sterile surgical practices, Lister and Keen,
were treated shabbily. Louis Pasteur may have marched microbiology, and
hence medicine, off in the wrong direction, by plagiarizing Antoine Béchamp. Emil
Grubbé was not exactly "welcomed" for discovering radium therapy.
Rife, Naessens, Reich
and many other pioneers of medicine have been subjected to vilification and endless legal and professional attacks. Those are
standard examples of the fates of scientific pioneers. Nikola Tesla has been
written out of the history books. That list can go on and on. A craving for
power and control typifies the members of the American government, those who run
the world's institutions, most corporate leaders, etc. The world of science is
no different, especially as men dominate it.
A pithy observation made by a Robber Baron during the Gilded Age was that “pioneering
don’t pay.”

With the rise of science
came the Industrial Revolution, and science was an integral part of its progress.
Consequently, science needed to be controlled by the capitalists, and it has been.
Attacks on scientific pioneers by their “peers” is standard human behavior, no
different with scientists than any other group of people. Also, certain scientific
and technological breakthroughs can be very bad for business, upsetting the rackets.
Therefore, true innovation is largely dead in many industries, such as transportation,
energy, medicine, etc. The greater the concentration
of power in the industry, the more scientific advances are stifled and crushed.
Also, as an example, industrially-sponsored/influenced "scientists"
such as Harold Hodge, Gerald Cox, Trendley Dean,
David Ast, Edward Largent and others turned an industrial waste, fluoride,
into a "medicine," while scientists such as Phyllis
Mullenix had their careers destroyed for reporting data that contradicted
the propaganda.

Not only are the obscure
pioneers mercilessly attacked and derided. Few Americans know anything about
Royal Rife. Few know who Gaston
Naessens is. How many Americans have heard of Thomas Edison and his light
bulb?

In 1879, Edison
was basking in fame. The year before, he had demonstrated the phonograph. He
had more than 150 patents to his name, and was known as the "Wizard of Menlo
Park." Edison’s crew devoted most of 1879 to solving a problem that had
defeated the world's most prominent electrical engineers: electrical lighting.
After testing thousands of materials for a filament that would work, and playing
with vacuum and various resistances, Edison hit on a combination that worked,
a high resistance filament in a vacuum. When the "Napoleon of Science"
announced that he had successfully created a practical electrical lamp, how did
the world of science react?

England's
most distinguished electrical engineer, Sir William Siemens, who had tried solving
the electrical lighting problem for ten years, greeted Edison's announcement with,
"Such startling announcements should be deprecated as being unworthy of science
and mischievous to its true progress." Edison soon perfected his light and
publicly demonstrated electrical lighting in Menlo Park, lighting the streets
around his laboratory. The public came from miles away to see the night lit up
by electrical lighting. Edison was demonstrating the "impossible" to
the public. What was the reaction of science then?

Professor
Henry Morton lived near Menlo Park, and could not be bothered to stretch his legs
to go see for himself. Morton instead wrote that he protested "in behalf
of true science." Morton wrote that Edison's experiments were "a conspicuous
failure, trumpeted as a wonderful success. A fraud upon the public." Professor
Du Moncel said, "One must have lost all recollection of American hoaxes
to accept such claims. The Sorcerer of Menlo Park appears not to be acquainted
with the subtleties of the electrical science. Mr. Edison takes us backwards."
Edwin Weston, an expert in arc lighting, said that Edison's claims were "so
manifestly absurd as to indicate a positive want of knowledge of the electric
circuit and the principles governing the construction and operation of electrical
machines." While the public was strolling under the radiance of the electrical
lighting in Menlo Park, Sir William Preece, who had studied under Faraday, and
was the chief engineer of Britain's Post Office, addressed the Royal Society in
London, where he read a paper under the day’s murky gaslights. Preece said that
Edison's electric lamp was "a completely idiotic idea."

Edison
was probably the world's most famous scientist at the time, and he was publicly
demonstrating something said to be "impossible." Not one scientist
could be bothered to go to Menlo Park and see it for themselves. Human feeble-mindedness
also applies to scientists, in spades. Scientists had abandoned one of their
most sacred principles, the principle of observation. That is not an anomaly.
Today, more than seventy years since Royal Rife
invented his Universal Microscope, most scientists have not even heard of it,
much less tried to reproduce it, so they can view life processes on a scale
that is still impossible today with "modern" technology. Gaston
Naessens is doing almost the very same thing today, and if his name comes
up in scientific circles, it is treated with contempt. Instead of taking the
time to look through that microscope themselves, or even buy one (they are cheap),
Naessens is treated as if he has the plague, if he is acknowledged at all. The
Catholic Inquisitors, who refused to look through Galileo's
telescope to see the moons of Jupiter for themselves, have professional descendents
that fill the ranks of today’s scientific establishment.

If
the world’s most famous scientist was treated that insanely, imagine how two obscure
bicycle mechanics were received when they achieved the "impossible"
- heavier-than-air flight. Perhaps the most amazing sight of the entire Industrial
Revolution was human flight, which the Wright brothers accomplished in December
of 1903. Similar to electrical lighting, heavier-than-air flight had frustrated
science. A few weeks before the Wright brothers first flew, Simon Newcomb, the
professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, published
an article in The Independent that scientifically demonstrated that human-powered
flight was "utterly impossible." In 1902, the chief engineer of the
Navy, Rear-Admiral George Melville, wrote in the North American Review
that attempting to fly was "absurd." Two months before the Wright brothers
flew, Professor Samuel Langley tried flying a craft from a houseboat on the Potomac,
and it plunged into the river. He tried it again nine days before the Wright
Brothers flew, and his plane was destroyed.

The
Wright brothers did not listen to the "experts" and flew at Kitty Hawk
in North Carolina. They returned to their bicycle shop in Dayton Ohio, and continued
refining their airplanes. They wrote to newspapers and politicians, inviting
them to come see human-powered flight, and even sent out pictures of their planes
in flight. They were ignored. It did not stop them from continuing to work on
their airplanes. They practiced their flying in a field owned by a Dayton bank
president, and regularly flew their planes. A rail line ran next to the field.
During one flight in 1905, the Wright brothers were flying when a passenger train
was rolling past the field. The general manager of the rail line and his chief
engineer were on the train, and the manager ordered the train stopped. They and
the passengers stared in wide-eyed amazement at the sight of a man flying through
the air. Many of those dazed witnesses wrote to the Dayton Daily News,
and asked why they were not reading about those men flying over "Huffman
Prairie."

Not only did the newspapers
not send a reporter out to look at such a sight, but letters from people who had
seen the Wright brothers in flight were burying them, and the papers complained
about the volume of letters they were receiving. Two highways also bordered the
field. All the while, the Wright brothers were mailing invitations across the
country to media and others to see them fly, an effort that was generally futile.
The local newspapers could not be bothered to send even one reporter to check
out the story that was happening nearly in sight of the newspaper offices. The
managing editor of the Dayton Daily News once spoke with Orville Wright,
who told him that he flew for about five minutes that day. The editor did not
believe him, and no story ever ran. Maybe if they flew a plane into the
newspaper building, somebody might have come out to investigate.

In
January 1906, more than two years after they first flew, science weighed in on
the persistent reports that the Wright brothers were flying. Scientific
American ran an article about the Wright brothers' flights. They implied
the Wright brothers were hoaxers, and cited the primary reason for not believing
the reports:

"If such sensational
and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote
part of the country, on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound
interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who,
it is well-known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face -
even if he has to scale a fifteen-story skyscraper to do so - would not have ascertained
all about them and published the broadcast long ago?"

There
it is, the myth of the vigilant, free press. The house organ of
science stated its reason for not believing the Wright brothers and their claims
of flight: because they had not read about it in the papers. It was not until
September 1908, when President Roosevelt ordered tests at Fort Myer, Virginia,
and the Wright brothers flew over the town for a week (after first flying over
Paris, where they first found fame, because the French were far more receptive
to the Wright brothers than Americans were), that the Wright brothers' flights
were accepted. It could be denied no longer. Science was finally forced to accept
it.[31] Even then, the Smithsonian Institution,
which helped fund Langley’s failed experiments, clouded the issue for generations,
trying to deny the Wright Brothers their rightful place as the fathers of powered
flight.

I lived in Dayton, where Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base is (it is built on Huffman Prairie), the biggest Air Force base
in the world, and the source of legends such as the Blue Room and Hangar 18, where
extraterrestrial craft and the remains of their
hapless occupants were allegedly stored. The Air Force Museum is also there,
in the town where the Wright brothers lived and whose feats were ignored for nearly
five years. In the museum is exhibited the Wright brothers story and their early
days, but the exhibit does not deal with the incredible denial that the American
establishment engaged in for nearly five years after they first flew.

Einstein
once observed that human stupidity is seemingly infinite. The danger is thinking
that scientists possess less of it than the public at large, when sometimes they
possess more.

Department
of Energy scientists tried explaining away what their Geiger counters told them
about Brown's Gas transmuting radioactive material during
the 1990s. They had to perform mental summersaults and nearly gouge their eyes
out to deny what their eyes and brains told them, but they accomplished it. Getting
a diploma from a university does not confer intelligence or make somebody a true
scientist. About 99% of those with engineering degrees have little creative talent.
Mr. Mentor once told me that most engineers are
plodders. They can be given some numbers to crunch or drawings to make, and they
will dutifully perform their tasks, bringing back their results when finished.
Not that the work may not be valuable, but there is often little creativity or
mental horsepower brought to bear on such activities. Those mundane activities
are similar to what Kuhn called “normal
science.” The vast majority of educated people cannot think past their textbooks,
whether it is in science, mathematics, history, politics,
accounting, etc. Creative insight is what drives
scientific and technical advances. Without that “right side” of the brain working,
analysis and technical drudgery provide little insight, and for those mired in
such quagmires, comprehending the possibility of flight or other textbook-challenging
ideas is nearly impossible, as Planck observed.

The
academic experience proves little, and negative learning often takes place. Some
of the best inventors and engineers were either self-taught or were mediocre students.
Einstein barely made it through his curriculum. Edison was self-taught, attending
school for three months of his life.

Werner
Heisenberg wrote of attending a meeting of atomic physicists
in 1952, when he had a chat with Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli. Bohr talked about
a lecture that he gave to a group of philosophers, whom he called mostly "positivists,"
on the subject of quantum theory. After his talk, Bohr was disappointed that
nobody asked any questions. Bohr wondered if he had failed in his talk, because
quantum theory is so strange that it should have elicited a great deal of questioning.
Pauli responded that Bohr should not be so hard on himself, that the positivists
accepted Bohr's explanation as received wisdom, and had no questions. Pauli essentially
said if that was the case, they did not really understand anything that Bohr had
said. Heisenberg wrote,

"The
positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which
we can say clearly, and the rest; which we had better pass over in silence. But
can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say
clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would
probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies."[32]

Those were the all-too-rare true scientists,
shaking their heads. Then Heisenberg and Pauli talked about the nature of the
soul.

In the real world, theft has
been a primary factor in human interaction. When Europe sailed
the high seas, it engaged in history’s greatest act of plunder and piracy.

In science, theft has been all-too-common.
The theft is not of land and resources, however; it is the theft of ideas, discoveries
and inventions. Theft and suppression is typical.
Ralph Moss' observation that the pioneers in cancer treatment have been ignored,
while the establishment eventually steals their work,
is standard. Isaac Newton engaged in a grotesque effort to claim precedence over
Leibniz in inventing calculus.[33]
The theft of math breakthroughs by college professors from their students is far
from unknown. Professors have become famous, while the students they stole from
are still unknown.

For centuries, scientists
attempted to explain what the auroras were. In 1896, Kristian Birkeland of Norway
boldly struck out in the right direction in explaining the auroras when he theorized
that electrons from the sun caused the auroras, being deflected to the poles by
earth's magnetic field, and the resultant auroras were like magnetic storms.
His bold theory was on the right track, but not embraced. Instead, he was fiercely
attacked by his peers for his "crazy" theory, and died a broken man
in 1917. His work was derided and suppressed for many years, the effort being
led by an English physicist named Sydney Chapman. Eventually Hannes Alfvén challenged
the auroric citadel that Chapman perched atop, revived Birkeland's theories, and
Alfvén was stonewalled by academia. It was not until 1970, when Alfvén picked
up his Nobel Prize, that Birkeland was posthumously vindicated. The ghost of
Birkeland must have been smiling.[34]

A
primary example of how the establishment works today against threatening scientific
breakthroughs is cold fusion. When Pons and Fleischmann made their startling
announcement of achieving cold fusion in 1989, it came on the heels of superconductors
being created at much higher temperatures than was thought possible. After the
initial cold fusion announcement, there was a worldwide frenzy, but soon after,
it was dismissed as a chimera, a non-reproducible phenomenon. Pons and Fleischmann's
names have become anathema in the halls of science. They had to leave America
to continue their research, which has now been confirmed more than one hundred
times in research institutes throughout the world. Brian
O’Leary and Richard Milton are familiar with
the data, which strongly suggests that cold fusion is real. So, why does everybody
I talk to think that it was disproven years ago? MIT was the first to attack
cold fusion’s experimental results, saying they were not reproducible, but it
is now known that they fudged the numbers to make their claim. Essentially, they
lied. Their voice, and others who were heavily invested in the status quo, as
they collect billions of dollars to pursue high temperature fusion (which would
be subsequently monopolized), carried the day. It happened recently, and the
cover-up continues to this day.[35] Brian O’Leary recently told me
that it is even worse today than in the days of the Wright brothers, as breakthroughs
such as cold fusion have been mercilessly attacked and dismissed by the scientific
establishment. It comes down to money, power, egos and dogma, not what is called
science.

I became mired in the issue of catastrophism while tracking
Carl Sagan's debunker career. Ten thousand pages of reading later and a great
deal of correspondence, I have concluded that to assess the validity of catastrophic
theory, particularly the multi-disciplinary approach that the psychiatrist Immanuel
Velikovsky first championed in this century, and has been further pursued by more
respectable scientists such as Victor Clube and Bill Napier, is a vast undertaking.

Velikovsky
is one in a long line of catastrophic theorists, a body of theory that is becoming
respectable again. For one person to fairly assess Velikovsky's theory in whole
would take at least twenty years of intense study in fields as diverse as physics,
astronomy, mythology, glaciology, archeology, dendrochronology, geology and other
fields. Velikovsky did not have the time to completely assess his thesis.
His theories stretch the imagination, but I cannot call them right or wrong with
great confidence. The debate over those issues is fierce and relegated to the
margins of scientific discourse, with the catastrophists generally called pseudoscientists
and crackpots. Sagan unfairly used his reputation
to hammer the nails into Velikovsky's public coffin, something Sagan did repeatedly.
The scientific establishment treated Velikovsky disgracefully, with Einstein being
one of the few scientists who treated Velikovsky cordially. If only the rest
of the scientists could have been as graceful.[36]

Richard Milton'sAlternative Science (formerly
titled Forbidden Science) is an excellent introduction to how scientific
pioneers have been maligned, and how the scientific establishment works today.
Joseph Schwartz's The Creative Moment is a neat recounting of the fatal
turns that science has made over the centuries.

A
major reason the world knows about Einstein's theories of relativity is because
they posed no immediate economic threat to powerful interests in 1905. If relativity
posed an immediate threat to the Rockefeller Empire or the other robber baron
industries, the world may have never heard of relativity, as it would have been
suppressed from the outset.

Nikola
Tesla’s story is a prime example. His theories and inventions had a potentially
dramatic impact on the world. Thomas Edison engaged in a disgraceful attack on
Tesla's work. Tesla invented the technology to use alternating current, which
powers the world today. Edison promoted his direct current. Direct current had
the great limitation of only being transmittable over short distances, because
its voltage was low, and therefore the resistance relatively high. The voltage
of alternating current, however, could be stepped up by transformers and be transmitted
great distances while losing very little of its power. Tesla had to forgo the
royalties that would have made him one of the world's richest men, so George Westinghouse
could survive the battle against Edison. Then J.P.
Morgan bankrolled Tesla…until Tesla began pursuing directions that could have
provided free energy. Morgan was a classic robber baron, knowing full well how
the racketeering aspect of capitalism worked, and quickly pulled the plug on Tesla
when he began making free energy noises. A famous quote, though apocryphal, is
that when Tesla showed Morgan how every person could have free energy by simply
putting a collector stake into the ground (Tesla was going to build a tower that
tapped the electric potential between the upper atmosphere and the ground, to
power the entire planet), Morgan responded with, “But where does the meter go?”

Tesla may have invented free energy, or came
close. There is plenty of conjecture about what has been suppressed regarding
his work. Tesla's inventions are legion. He invented radio before Marconi.
He had about 700 patents.

An excellent
book that covers the "suppression syndrome," as Brian O'Leary brilliantly
puts it, is Suppressed Inventions and other Discoveries, edited by Jonathan
Eisen. The stories of people discussed on this web site, such as Naessens,
Rife, Hoxsey,
Gerson, Moss, Reich and others are covered in its pages. The
epic work on Tesla's life is Wizard, the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla,
by Marc Seifer, but it does not discuss some possible aspects of the Tesla story
that are intriguing, such as the alleged Philadelphia Experiment. Although his
alternating current prevailed, the electric companies are often named "Edison"
companies. Even though Tesla founded an electric company, there is no Tesla Electric
Company, except for the one that Dennis Lee tried reviving. Recently there has been
controversy over the Smithsonian Institution's display on Edison and electricity.
The Smithsonian is making the bogus claim that Edison invented the modern era
of power and that Marconi invented the radio. Tesla has been shunted off to a
dark corner by the establishment, while Edison is a household word. Interestingly,
Tesla was incensed with Einstein's theories of relativity and assailed them, proposing
his own counter-theories.

Jonathan
Swift once wrote:

“When a true
genius appears in this world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are
all in confederacy against him.”[37]

In
his 1984, Orwell called orthodox thinking a form
of unconsciousness. In order for the dunces to think like geniuses, they have
to abandon their assumptions and dogmas, and gain some flexibility of thought.
Such unthinking has been called inverted logic. That phenomenon has been discernable
in every field of mental endeavor, whether it is science, economics, journalism, medicine, history, etc.

Genius
is simple, sees the forest and the trees, and cuts to the heart of the
issue. The greatest geniuses I have known combine creative insight with the power
of discrimination. I know some geniuses with great creative insight, but less
developed discrimination, which can make them appear "ungrounded."
Quite often, geniuses like that need a partner or mate whose feet are more firmly
grounded, to keep the balance. Einstein was kind of like that; he never learned
to drive a car or work any machinery. It is rare for the genius to have a full
balance of creativity and discrimination, and to have it in balance with the heart
is rarer still. They exist, but are extremely rare.

Galileo
and Newton were devoutly religious. Newton pursued theology for the rest of his
life after about age thirty, proving that he was much better in math and science.
As with Einstein and numerous other physicists, Newton's major contributions to
science and mathematics were made before he was thirty years old. Werner Heisenberg
invented quantum physics, which stands with relativity as the two pillars of modern
physics, and invented it in a fevered weekend when he was twenty-four years old.
Leibniz and Newton invented calculus independently at around the same time. Leibniz
was also in his twenties when he invented calculus, and Newton was only twenty-three.
Leibniz published his work before Newton did, although Newton invented his calculus
first. Erwin Schroedinger was the other father of quantum theory. Schroedinger
was an old man in theoretical physics, nearly forty years old, when he published
his wave mechanics theory.

What happens
is that those fresh to the field, who can look at the problems with new eyes,
make the great breakthroughs. After that, they can fall prey to their point of
view, and rarely make great contributions later.

The
rise of science in the West coincided with the loosening of Christianity’s grip,
the Catholic Church’s in particular, on the minds and hearts of men. Galileo,
Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schroedinger…modern physics rides on those men's
shoulders. Others also contributed greatly, such as Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli,
Arthur Eddington, Max Planck, Louis De Broglie, and others. It is not a very
large group of men. In our present day, the closest thing that we have (at least
publicly) to those giants of physics is probably Stephen Hawking, the man who
lives in a wheelchair with Lou Gehrig's disease. Would it be surprising to know
that all those scientists named above were profoundly religious or mystical in
their worldview? Every single one of them knew that there was far more to the
world than the materialistic worldview espoused by people such as Carl
Sagan. The giants of physics were deeply spiritual, each in their own way.

In Ken Wilber's Quantum
Questions, he put the mystical writings of the fathers of twentieth century
physics in one book. The mystical writings of Einstein, Heisenberg, Schroedinger,
Eddington, de Broglie, and others are reproduced. Here are some quotes from the
world's greatest physicists.

“I
don't know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been
only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then
finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” - Isaac Newton, to a companion,
not long before his death.[38]

"The
scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a
lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent
order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our
heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue,
bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful
and ugly, good and bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer
questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we're
not inclined to take them seriously…The scientific world-picture vouchsafes a
very complete understanding of all that happens - it makes it just a little too
understandable. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical
clockwork which, for all that science knows, could go on just the same as it does,
without there being consciousness, will, endeavor, pain and delight and responsibility
connected with it - though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting
situation is just this: that, for the purpose of constructing the picture of the
external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own
personality out, removing it; hence it is gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly
not needed…Whence come I, and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question,
the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it." - Erwin
Schroedinger[39]

"Please
note that the very recent advance [of quantum and relativistic physics - Ed.]
does not lie in the world of physics having acquired this shadowy character; it
had ever since Democritus and Abdera and even before, but we were not aware of
it; we thought we were dealing with the world itself." - Erwin Schroedinger[40]

"I
should like to stress the following:

1.Modern science, in its beginning, was characterized by a conscious modesty;
it made statements about strictly limited relations that are only valid within
the framework of these limitations.

2.This modesty was largely lost during the nineteenth century. Physical
knowledge was considered to make assertions about nature as a whole. Physics wished
to turn philosopher, and the demand was voiced from many quarters that all true
philosophers must be scientific.

3.Today physics has undergone a basic change, the most characteristic trait
of which is to return to its original self-limitation.

4.The philosophic content of science is only preserved if science is conscious
of its limits. Great discoveries of the properties of individual phenomena are
possible only if the nature of the phenomena are not generalized a priori.
Only by leaving open the question of the ultimate essence of a body, of matter,
of energy, etc. can physics reach an understanding of the individual properties
of the phenomena that we designate by these concepts, an understanding which alone
may lead us to real philosophical insight." - Werner Heisenberg[41]

"The
essential fact is simply that all the pictures that science draws of nature, and
which alone seem capable of according with observational fact, are mathematical
pictures...They are nothing more than pictures - fictions if you like, if by fiction
you mean that science is not yet in contact with ultimate reality. Many would
hold that, from the broad philosophical standpoint, the outstanding achievement
of twentieth-century physics is not the theory of relativity with its welding
together of space and time, or the theory of quanta with its present apparent
negation of the laws of causation, or the dissection of the atom with the resultant
discovery that things are not what they seem; it is the general recognition that
we are not yet in contact with ultimate reality. We are still imprisoned in our
cave, with our backs to the light, and can only watch shadows on the wall."
- James Jeans[42]

"The
fact is that there is a point, one single point in the immeasurable world of mind
and matter, where science and therefore every causal method of research is inapplicable,
not only on practical grounds but also on logical grounds, and will always remain
inapplicable. This point is the individual ego. It is a small point in the universal
realm of being, but, in itself, it is a whole world, embracing our emotional life,
our will, and our thought." - Max Planck[43]

“You
will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious
feeling of his own…His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement
at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority
that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings
is an utterly insignificant reflection…[regarding this feeling - Ed.] It is beyond
question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all
ages.” - Albert Einstein[44]

Those are the words
of the giants of physics. Here are the words of the "skeptics."

“…when I say I am glad I live in the
century when the universe is essentially understood, I think I am justified.”
- Isaac Asimov[45]

“This
is also a book about God… or perhaps about the absence of God. Hawking is attempting,
as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God… And this makes all the
more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with
no edge in space, no beginning or end to time, and nothing for a Creator to do.”
- Carl Sagan[49]

“There
are only four different forces in existence…” - Milton Rothman[50]

Wilber made clear that
the great physicists saw no conflict between religion and science. Wilber could
have said "spirituality and science," but he said "religion,"
and I will deal with that. Wilber stated that the greatest physicists saw the
conflict as not between science and religion, but between the bogus and the genuine,
and science and religion has plenty of both. Bogus science and religion are the
dogmatic and authoritarian aspects of them. “Religion” has "proofs"
as science does. It can be tested. It is not a matter of blind faith or suspending
one's mental faculties. I have pursued the mystical and the paranormal, and I
have my own proofs, but I cannot prove anything about it to anybody else.
Each of us can only find our own proof, which is partly why our current science
cannot truly investigate the nature of consciousness. Today’s science assumes
objectivity. Objectivity is probably a myth propagated by our five physical senses.
The authoritarian dogmas in science and religion were what those physicists
had a problem with.

As Heisenberg,
Jeans and Schroedinger wrote, the theories and data of relativity and quantum
theory showed those scientists that something was awry with the notion that science
dealt with reality. It became obvious to the giants of physics that science
was another artificial way of viewing the world, and had no ultimate answers,
which helped propel them to their mystical worldviews. Although the greatest
physicists of all time gladly admitted that we barely know anything, and kept
science in perspective, realizing its limitations, those such as Sagan and Asimov
were confident that science had it all figured out, or nearly. They typified
the delusions of every age, thinking they were on the brink of knowing it all,
or that they even had the tools and ability to figure it out.

There
is a word for the attitude of the Sagans, Asimovs and "skeptics." It
is called scientism. It is the worship of science and its methods, believing
that it alone has the valid perspective of reality. It is another religion, with
its priests and popes. Almost without exception, “skeptics”
have proven themselves establishment defenders, scientific and otherwise. They
are true believers of a different kind, and their political-economic situations
have everything to do with their perspectives. “Pure science” does not exist.

My First Glimpse

I
lived in an area with many professionals and scientists, largely serving the local
military bases. Among the adults I knew during my childhood years, I was kind
of “adopted” by most of my friends’ parents, and one mentor in particular took
me under his wing. He was one of the 20th century’s greatest inventive
minds, with inventions that revolutionized entire
industries. Others were so revolutionary that they were suppressed in the
interest of preserving the status quo. Every invention was either stolen
or suppressed, and he never made a dime from any of them.

Mr.
Mentor was an engineer, and he spent many years doing mechanical work with his
hands, and continually expressed his amazement at how poorly engineered the day’s
automobiles were, as he worked on them. One day, more than thirty years ago,
he was pondering the problems of modern automobiles, and how they utilize energy.
He began considering what an energy-efficient car might look like, if he could
build one from scratch. Aspects of the issue had been rolling around in his head
for years, but one day he was sitting at a stoplight, and a vision suddenly came
upon him. He saw the ideal car engine in his mind’s eye, complete. He drove
home, got a pencil and paper, and in a few minutes had sketched out his ideal
engine for powering a car.

The patent
for Mr. Mentor’s engine expired long ago, and anybody can try to build one, but
patents are meaningless when inventions such as Mr. Mentor’s are considered.
The protection people need when pursuing such technologies are not patents, but
get-out-of-jail-free cards, bulletproof vests and guardian angels. I will present
a brief description of Mr. Mentor’s engine, to show not only that there are numerous
viable alternatives to today’s business-as-usual, but to also demonstrate how
genius works. Dennis Lee was pursuing this very technology when he was first
thrown into jail in 1988.

In the instance
of Mr. Mentor’s engine, it was not immediately stolen, partly because it was so
radically different that it was not easy to initially comprehend. However, he
had produced so many startling innovations by that time, even though many of the
best were stolen from him, that the higher-ups took him seriously when he proposed
one of his new “crazy” ideas. The federal government spent about $250,000 to
have Mr. Mentor’s engine patented, and the government claimed rights to its use,
because they funded the patent process. The government brought in an outside
expert to assess it. He was a rocket scientist who helped save the U.S. space
program in the early 1960s. He figured out why so many rockets were exploding
as they took off (inconsistent combustion, similar to how a match head flickers
when burning, except amplified zillions of times in a rocket, creating stresses
that blew apart the early rockets) and also solved the problem. He met with Mr.
Mentor, and after a lot of hand waving and blackboard drawings, the rocket scientist
comprehended the fullness of what Mr. Mentor had come up with, and became its
greatest champion.[51]

Then
Mr. Mentor’s engine became a big deal. During the hoopla, one person close to
the situation told Mr. Mentor that he hoped he was not serious about actually
developing his engine and making the internal combustion engine obsolete, because
the Detroit car companies would then have him murdered. The engine was a big deal nevertheless,
and a rich industrialist offered to go into business with Mr. Mentor and the rocket
scientist to develop and sell that engine. The only hitch was that the industrialist
would own 95% of the company, with Mr. Mentor and the rocket scientist sharing
in the other 5%. With a deal like that, all pursuit of the engine ended, and
Mr. Mentor ended his career soon afterward, a bitter man. His engine was not
forgotten, however.

Not long after
that engine created a stir in the government, 1973 rolled around and the OPEC
oil embargo made the world energy situation headline news. In the wake of the
energy crisis and Jimmy Carter’s “declaration of war” on the energy issue, a huge
federal study was launched regarding alternative engine designs, to conserve energy,
oil in particular. Building on earlier analytical work performed by the government,
the study quickly focused on Mr. Mentor's engine, and devoted about a third of
its effort to analyzing it. Many man-years were spent analyzing Mr. Mentor’s
engine design. The study concluded that Mr. Mentor's engine was by far the most
effective engine in the world for powering a car. A United States Senator, who
had made a reputation as the alternative energy Senator, began calling Mr. Mentor
at home in the wake of the study’s published results. He begged Mr. Mentor to
come to Washington D.C. to host congressional hearings regarding having his engine
developed. By that time, Mr. Mentor was retiring an angry and bitter man, recalled
the “make your funeral plans” advice he was given if he seriously considered pursuing
the development of his engine, and the engine was pursued no further, although
a company did make his engine (without consulting him) and drove it in
a Rose Bowl parade in the 1970s, announcing that it was going to revolutionize
the automobile industry. They quickly disappeared from the scene, probably suffering
the fate that other companies had when they tried challenging Detroit’s automotive
oligopoly.

The rocket scientist was
awed by Mr. Mentor's invention. He said that there were numerous “wrong turns”
that his engine design could have taken, and that he estimated that Mr. Mentor’s
engine should have taken a team of engineers twenty years to design. It came
to him in a flash at a stoplight. That was how Tesla also did his inventing.
It had a lot to do with psychic ability. The intuitive
aspect of human consciousness is almost wholly neglected by the scientific paradigm,
though its greatest theoreticians almost always had to thank their imaginations
and intuitive ability for their breakthroughs, not their intellects.

Here
is how Mr. Mentor’s engine worked, my understanding coming partly from studying
his expired patents, and partly from conversations with him many years ago. The
engine, as with all engines, operated in a cycle.

The
engine was an external combustion engine, not an internal combustion engine, meaning
that the combustion took place outside the engine and not inside it, as with a
car engine. The working fluid began its journey in a boiler. The boiler was
subjected to a flame created by burning the fuel. As the working fluid boiled,
the gas expanded and left the boiler through a pipe. The working fluid’s steam
then met what Mr. Mentor called a pressure intensifier, which was one of his engine’s
major innovations. A drawing of the pressure intensifier and its position in
the engine is presented below.

The
principle of the pressure intensifier was that high-pressure steam would come
from the boiler and meet the piston head (area A in the drawing). As it pushed
the piston down, it gave its energy to the piston, becoming a cooler gas at a
lower pressure as it left the cylinder. The boiling point of any substance is
determined by the attraction of the molecules to each other, and the temperature
and the pressure it is subjected to. A pot of water, for instance, boils at 212°
F at sea level on earth, but at less than 150° F on top of Mount
Everest. If we put water in a jar and hook up a vacuum pump to create a vacuum,
the water will boil at room temperature. The fluid that left the boiler was turned
into steam by the heat applied by the flame. It gave energy picked up in the
boiler to the piston, as it pushed it down. It left the cylinder cooler and at
less pressure, which was closer to its condensing point than when it entered the
cylinder. The journey of the working fluid makes its way to the piston’s other
side in the pressure intensifier (area B in my drawing). The amount of force
exerted by the piston is easily calculated, and is the pressure of the gas multiplied
by the piston head’s surface. If the gas pressure was 100 PSI and the piston
head’s surface area was 10 square inches, 1000 pounds of force would be applied
to the piston (100 X 10) on side A. On the piston’s other side is another head.
The pressure the piston exerted on the steam in area B would be the force exerted
divided by the surface area of the piston’s head. So, if the piston’s other head
was only two square inches in area, and 1000 pounds of pressure were exerted,
the pressure the gas would be subjected to would be 500 PSI (1000 / 2). By knowing
the pressure of the working fluid leaving the boiler (mainly determined by the
boiler’s temperature), and adjusting the surface areas of both heads of the piston,
any desired pressure could be applied to the working fluid in the back end of
the cylinder.

At a certain pressure
and temperature, the working fluid would re-condense. Studying my refrigerator
discussion may make some of this easier to understand. Not only would the
working fluid re-condense, it could be made to be any pressure needed, just by
varying the surface areas of the pressure intensifier piston’s two heads. Let
us say that 2000 PSI was desired, and the boiler sent out steam at 100 PSI. Then,
the surface area of the piston’s front end would need to be 20 times the surface
area of the far end. In essence, the working fluid worked on itself, making a
low-pressure liquid in the boiler a high-pressure liquid in the far end of the
pressure intensifier. Some of the energy delivered at the boiler would have been
expended driving the piston downward, and that energy would be stored in the liquid’s
pressure on the other end. The high-pressure liquid would then enter a hydraulic
accumulator, which was simply a reservoir where the high-pressure liquid rested.
Because the boiler and pressure intensifier determined the pressure the reservoir
was subjected to, the cooling liquid in the hydraulic accumulator would not affect
the accumulator’s pressure. As it cooled, the pressure would decrease, but would
be offset by the pressure coming from the intensifier. A steady state would be
achieved in the system, with the hydraulic accumulator’s liquid awaiting its further
journey. When the accumulator achieved the desired pressure, the boiler would
turn off, just as the thermostat in one’s home turns off the furnace, except it
was pressure, not temperature, sensitive.

Hydraulic
motors are highly efficient, at more than 90% efficiency. The fluid in the hydraulic
accumulator would be fed to hydraulic motors. In the case of an automobile, the
motors would be at the wheels. Each wheel could have its own motor. The car
could run with one motor or four. The only limitation was if the car owner wanted
to pay for four motors, three, two or one. Four would have been ideal, with every
car having four-wheel drive, which is superior to two-wheel drive for safety and
other reasons. Yet, three of the four motors could fail, and the car could still
run. After the working fluid gave its energy to the hydraulic motor process,
it would have been a low pressure liquid, perhaps near its boiling point, and
would have been ready to go back into the boiler.

That
is a brief description of the working fluid’s travels through the engine, but
there is more to tell. As a car drove down a city street and the stoplight turned
red, when the driver put her foot on the brake, the hydraulic motors would reverse
direction and act as pumps, pumping the hydraulic fluid back into the accumulator.
Instead of making brake linings hot and wearing them out, the kinetic energy of
the car would be put back into the system, not wasted. It was like putting the
gasoline back into the tank after it had been burned. That was one of the more
ingenious aspects of Mr. Mentor’s engine.

Here
are the problems that Mr. Mentor’s engine solved.

It was an external combustion
engine, and solved several problems that plague internal combustion engines.
The pollutants that resulted from incomplete combustion due to the rapid mechanical
processes in internal combustion engines, such as carbon monoxide, would no longer
be produced. Another issue was the high temperatures and pressures of internal
combustion engines making atmospheric nitrogen react with atmospheric oxygen,
creating the nitrogen oxides that not only make the air brown, but are also a
component of acid rain and a greenhouse gas. With an external combustion engine,
the burn could be perfected to the ideal burn, at a lower temperature and pressure
than was in internal combustion engines. Mr. Mentor’s engine would have produced
almost exclusively carbon dioxide and water, which is the least polluting form
of combustion there is.

The
prime mover (pressure intensifier) would operate at one speed, and in doing so
could be made to operate at its ideal speed for maximum efficiency. No more running
up and down the efficiency curve, as with today’s car engines, as they operate
over a wide spectrum of engine speeds. That was accomplished largely by uncoupling
the prime mover from the drive train. Think of the engine and transmission of
a car. The transmission directly relied on the engine moving in order to operate
and propel the car. Another source of the pollution was the variable speed at
which today’s engines operate. The widely variable combustion is not only inefficient,
but also partly how pollutants are created. In Mr. Mentor’s engine, the pressure
intensifier and hydraulic motors were separated by the hydraulic accumulator,
which made them operate independently of each other, increasing the prime mover’s
efficiency.

Mr.
Mentor’s engine would have reclaimed the energy lost due to braking in today’s
vehicles, putting it back into the hydraulic accumulator. That had numerous benefits,
some not immediately obvious. One was that city driving MPG would have skyrocketed.
The experts estimated that a mail truck driving through neighborhoods might achieve
200 MPG with Mr. Mentor’s engine, mainly because it would be traveling so slowly
that air resistance would have been minimal, which is where most energy is used
in a car traveling down the highway at 60 MPH. Air resistance increases at the
square of the vehicle’s velocity If city MPG for cars leapt to a mere 100 MPG,
it would mean that only 20% as much fuel would be burned in town, meaning that
80% of the potential air pollution would have been eliminated, as well as reducing
the thermal pollution that all Western cities experience. Not only that, the
external combustion engine would have had near-perfect burning, and most American
urban air pollution problems would have immediately disappeared. Also, it would
have been a quiet engine, eliminating a great deal of noise pollution.

Not bad, for coming to him
in a flash at a stoplight. Heisenberg’s quantum physics came to him in a fevered
weekend. Einstein’s relativity came to him, complete one morning, as he woke
up.[52] They had the technical/analytical
ability and training to assess how feasible their bright idea was. Many years
later, I had a more mundane version of how Mr. Mentor had his stoplight vision,
when I saw a way to get every American truck driver home every night. I know
that the intellect cannot claim credit for that flash of creative insight.

As with others like him, Mr. Mentor was intimately
familiar with the technical issues, spending many years pondering the automobile’s
internal combustion engine and its problems. He had enormous analytical ability,
getting the highest math score on a standardized test in his home state, earning
him a full-ride scholarship to a major university. Without his great technical
ability, what came to him at a stoplight would not have gotten very far, and the
vision probably would not have come to him in the first place.

His
long pondering of the issues brought him to the place where his insightful moment
at the stoplight was valuable. Practical genius needs both the left and right
sides of the brain to be working together, or stated another way, the creative
and analytic abilities working in harmony. The creative spark can make itself
known in a flash, while the analytical part often has to spend years validating
it. Analysis without the creative spark can be virtually worthless, or worse.
Many scientists have been frozen into the analytic and intellectual mode, and
are unable to comprehend or experience the creative spark that illuminated the
greatest geniuses, both scientific and spiritual. Even a far lesser light such
as Carl Sagan had some idea regarding the importance
of the intuitive side. Sagan was an inveterate marijuana smoker, believing that
his best ideas came while stoned.

Mr.
Mentor’s engine never went anywhere, largely due to the inertia and corruption
in today’s system. The major government study was dutifully filed away and forgotten.
Our system wastes a vast amount of talent and genius. Mr. Mentor was far from
alone in being stolen from or ignored for his genius. It is standard
operating procedure in today’s world. The military base Mr. Mentor worked
at had many thousands of employees. Mr. Mentor estimated that the only creative
talent there that amounted to much consisted of a handful of people. Birds of
a feather flock together, and he knew the other great talents there. Generally,
they were treated like he was. Mr. Mentor’s superiors and “peers” even waited
for people such as Mr. Mentor to come along, so they could steal their ideas.
One thief actually laughed in Mr. Mentor’s face, telling him that he was “stupid”
enough to allow him to steal his idea.

His
superiors would not even be sly about their theft. For instance, one standard
procedure was when a scientist or engineer would write a scientific paper worthy
of publication or oral delivery to a symposium, the bosses would step in, call
the paper their work, and deliver it to accolades at the symposia. One oceanographer
pal of Mr. Mentor wrote an outstanding paper. His boss told him that he would
deliver it to a symposium and call it his own. The oceanographer was able to
get into the symposium, watch his boss deliver the paper as his own, and see the
accolades it received, with his boss bathing in the spotlight. He at least had
the satisfaction of seeing that his work was well received, even though he received
no credit for it. A major university tried to recruit another one of Mr. Mentor’s
pals. One of the perks they waved under his nose was telling him that he would
have many bright graduate students working for him, and when they came up with
anything good, he could steal it and call it his own. It was standard operating
practice at the university. That is how the “real world” works.

The
thieves often could not even steal properly. They knew Mr. Mentor’s inventions
were something worth stealing, but they often could not even understand the rudiments.
One system Mr. Mentor designed was stolen by one of the thieves, who rushed it
into production. The thief had such a poor understanding of what he stole that
it was made and installed upside down. Mr. Mentor laughed about it, but in truth,
he would have been happier if the thieves had actually built it right side up.

How long will an inventor
invent, when everything he does is suppressed or stolen? Not forever. Although
nearly every home in the West uses technology that Mr. Mentor’s inventions made
possible, and companies made billions of dollars off of them, Mr. Mentor never
received a dime of compensation or recognition. His tale is not that unusual.
The military base where he worked raped all inventors such as Mr. Mentor, and
all his buddies with any talent soon left that base, and most abandoned their
careers. When Mr. Mentor slipped into his rocking chair in the 1970s, that base,
which employed many thousands of people and made up the majority of the local
economy, did not have one operational system. The entire base and surrounding
community was completely worthless, if deriving any benefit to the American people
was its goal, all due to greed and stupidity.

With
the U.S. leading the way, the world’s white people (Europeans and their descendants,
such as white Americans, Canadians, Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders,
white residents of the former Soviet Union, etc.) comprise about 18% of the world
population but consume more than 60% of its energy. Today, there is scarcely
an ecosystem on earth that has not been plundered past its near-term recoverability,
or has not been put under humanity’s yoke, to primarily serve human needs and
desires. The goal of ecosystem exploitation is nearly invariably the extraction
of useful energy, usually in the form of food.

It
is well known that the most reliable indicator of economic production is energy
consumption. The first table below shows the gross domestic product for various
nations, from the poorest to the richest. The per capita income of a Swiss citizen
is more than 400 times higher than the per capita income of an Ethiopian citizen.
The disparity is vast, but as the second table shows, the per capita income divided
by the energy consumed is nearly a constant number. For Great Britain and Ethiopia,
with a 200-fold disparity in income per capita, the ratio of income to energy
consumption is 0.30 to 0.32, nearly identical.

In
the table below, the nations on each end of the scale evidence special circumstances,
such as Switzerland’s reliance on efficient hydroelectric production, Japan’s
lack of control over its energy sources, or the economic hardship cases of India,
Pakistan, Poland and Russia, largely because of the penalty they have paid for
escaping the West’s domination (“free market” exchange rates also affect this
ratio), however temporarily. The ratio of income and energy consumption per person
is fairly constant among the world’s nations, from richest to poorest, from $0.20
to $0.50 of income per unit of energy (the energy derived from burning one KG
of coal) consumed.

Click on image to enlarge.

In
2000, 23% of the United States’ energy consumption came from burning coal, 24%
by burning natural gas and 39% by burning oil; about 86% of U.S. consumption thusly
came from burning fossil fuels. Nuclear energy was 8%, with hydroelectric and
biomass at 3% each, with the typical “renewable” energy (geothermal, solar and
wind) totaling about half of one percent of U.S. energy consumption. The United
States accounts for slightly more than 25% of global energy consumption. Globally,
the fossil fuel percentages of consumptions were nearly identical, and nuclear
and hydroelectric energy were about 7% each, and “renewable” energy accounted
for less than 1%.[53]

The “developing world” is “undeveloped” because
the white world actively prevented its development.
With only so much of the world’s resources to go around, preventing the world’s
poor from industrial development ensured that they would not compete for the world’s
resources, especially energy resources.

In
the United States, more than 90% of its coal production is burned to make electricity
(most of the remainder is exported). Burning coal fuels about half of the United
States’ electricity production. Going back to Carnot and
the limitations of heat engines, about two-thirds of the heat generated by burning
coal is lost to the electric production process. In the parlance of the energy
industry, such losses are known as “conversion losses,” or “waste heat.” Largely
due to those losses of conversion, electricity is more expensive than other fuels,
per unit of energy delivered to the home. Of the 97 quadrillion BTUs consumed
in the United States in 1999, about 26 quadrillion were “wasted” in conversion
losses during electricity production.

In
summary, nearly 100% of U.S. consumption is used for the creation of heat energy
(hydroelectric power generation is the only significant exception), and about
50% of that heat is directly used to heat things (mainly to create human-friendly
environments), about 30% is wasted in conversion losses, and about 20% creates
mechanical energy, to either propel transportation equipment or run electric devices
(air conditioners count in that category). Those are rough numbers.

Because
of those conversion losses, the cost of building and maintaining electricity plants
and the electric grid, and the vast and still largely unaccounted costs of nuclear
energy, electricity is nearly four times as expensive as natural gas. There are
regional variations, and electric companies can give preferential pricing to consumers
who use electricity for heating, but the 1999 price differential of 3.75 (residential
electricity costs divided by residential natural gas costs) is close to the 4.0
rate that existed in 1980, when U.S. energy costs were near their all time highs
in constant dollars. This discussion will use the 4.0 rate.

Of
that 50% of U.S. energy consumption that goes to heat, most is used to heat human
environments. Natural gas is used for about 70% of American residential space
heating, with electricity used for less than 8%. The U.S. residential heating
market is around $45 billion per year, with the residential electric market around
$90 billion, and the U.S. energy bill is around $600 billion.

A
Case History in Alternative Energy Suppression

The
adventures of Dennis Lee constitute an extraordinary case history of how alternative
energy has been suppressed in America. His effort is perhaps the most sustained
ever made to try bringing alternative energy to the American marketplace. An
ancillary essay tells his tale, with the highlights
presented here.

Dennis was raised in
a family of migrant farm workers, left home at age 13, was a medic in the army
and ended up in combat in Southeast Asia. He
had a timely paranormal experience, just as he
was about to commit suicide, and he devoted his life from that time forward to
making the world a better place. After nearly being murdered by organized crime in Alaska, he fled to New Jersey
and went to college, studying Utopian literature and social psychology. After
his college days he went into the construction
business, trying to bring craftsmanship back to home building. His business
was destroyed during America’s first energy crisis, and he then invented
a card that today has reincarnated in watered-down form as the Discover Card.
He began that company with no capital and learned many hard lessons about how
the business world operated. The Mafia tried killing
him, he became a Christian, and eventually the company went out of business.
Dennis tried giving it away to the Christian community, but the
company died.

Dennis ended up in his home state
of Washington, just when the “Whoops” energy
disaster hit, and tried making the heating business happen in his hometown. His
business associates again thwarted him, and he went
to Seattle in 1984 to try it there. In Seattle in 1985 he mounted what may be the greatest
effort ever made to bring alternative energy to the American marketplace, and
discovered that the energy establishment and the Mafia have a lot in common, except
the Mafia may act more honorably. In the energy industry’s attempt to wipe Dennis’
company out, they were responsible for the death of
one of his employees.

I met Dennis in Seattle, and worked for the company
until my boss helped steal it. Dennis was run
out of the state and tried rebuilding his effort in Boston. I followed him. In Boston, Dennis got his “free
energy” idea, and we moved to California to tie into talent and money to make
it happen, and that is when it really got rough. Technical innovations
came to us that might have made free energy possible, and then they lowered
the sledgehammer on us, with Dennis nearly going to prison for life, and many
lives were shattered. A handful of us stood up to the judicial establishment’s
criminal actions as it did the energy industry’s bidding, and we prevailed, sort
of. Dennis only spent two years behind bars, and has continued his free
energy quest ever since.

Why Is There No Alternative Energy?

My journey with Dennis was a traumatic
learning experience, and I went through years of slow disillusionment, with various
salient moments (1 - 2
- 3 - 4)
punctuating the process. It hit rock bottom for me when I, a committed pacifist,
saw myself in my mind’s eye killing people, and liking
it. When I had my lowest moment, I instead mortgaged my life to spring Dennis
out of jail, and it worked.

It was
in those days that my most surprising and painful realization hit me: personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity,
and the reason we not only do not enjoy alternative or free energy today is not
because there are energy gangsters doing their dirty deeds, but that not enough
people care enough. As I began looking into medicine,
American foreign policy and elsewhere, I saw the
same phenomenon. People to whom doing the right thing is more important than
their reward for doing it is on the order of one in thousands. With that level
of integrity, we just might be doomed. The only answer I can see is for more
people to care more, and those who care more can also begin seeing vistas that
have previously been largely invisible, which this web site is trying to help
them see. Paradoxically, caring for others is probably the only way we can save
ourselves.

The point of this essay
is not if free energy is possible or not, with what Dennis is promoting or not.
The point is that there is an energy establishment, and any move to try bringing
innovation to the marketplace is met with the sledgehammer, Dennis’ adventures
being a historic example. With what happened to a relatively mundane effort to
bring alternative energy to the marketplace, who can confidently say what else
has, or has not, been suppressed? What happened to us was
fairly typical, but harsher, because Dennis’ efforts threatened to have an
immediate impact in the marketplace. That is when they take the gloves
off. Inventors tinkering in their garages are largely left alone,
unless they try getting something market-ready, or begin making noise.

On several fronts, our
energy-production practices threaten to doom humanity. Today, the United States
is engaging in genocide in Iraq, as part of an effort to control
the Middle East’s oil. Under the rubric of the War
on Terror, the U.S. is moving to militarily control the world’s most lucrative
store of unexploited oil and gas deposits, in Central Asia. Atmospheric carbon
dioxide helps make the earth’s surface 60° F warmer than it would
otherwise be, making life on earth possible. During the 1700s, before the Industrial
Revolution, there were about 275 parts per million (PPM) of carbon dioxide in
earth’s atmosphere. Burning fossil fuels has been almost entirely responsible
for increasing the PPM to 365 today, for an increase of about 33%.

Other
greenhouse gases have been increasing rapidly, due to humanity’s ways. Methane
is the other naturally occurring greenhouse gas. The destruction of the world’s
forests have increased the termite populations, as they feed off of the wreckage,
and they produce methane as a byproduct of their digestion, as do domestic cellulose-digesting
animals, which have also greatly increased. In addition, the paddy system of
China creates a great deal of methane, from decaying manure and plant matter.
Those factors have created more than a 140% increase in atmospheric methane since
the 18th century. Methane makes up less than 2 PPM in earth’s atmosphere,
but it is also twenty times as effective at trapping infrared radiation as carbon
dioxide is, and makes up about 17% of today’s greenhouse effect.

Chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs) are artificial chemicals made for refrigeration and other uses, and although
they make up a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, their effect is tremendous. They
not only are probably part of why the ozone layer is under duress, but they are
thousands of times as effective as carbon dioxide at trapping infrared radiation,
and CFCs make up 12% of the greenhouse gas effect.

Lastly,
all the nitrous oxides created by high-temperature combustion (the brown haze
in urban smog) are 120 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, and
nitrous oxides comprise 5% of the greenhouse effect.[54]

It
does not take a rocket scientist to figure out what the effects may be, and we
are seeing it today. Global warming is already happening.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the glaciers have been rapidly shrinking. In the
summer of 2001, I was near Glacier Peak, looking
in awe at where the glaciers were. It appears that in about twenty years,
Glacier Peak will be misnamed. People who have hiked in the Cascade Mountains
for more than sixty years have told me that the rapid disappearance of the glaciers
has been incredible to witness. I may witness the complete disappearance of the
Arctic icepack. The effects will be far more dramatic than the polar bear becoming
extinct. With the Arctic permafrost melting today, it is predicted that great
amounts of methane will be released from that process, among the many catastrophic
effects such a melting will bring (such as killing off all the far northern forests).
There are also other theories about what is behind global warming, such as increased
solar output[55]
and increased volcanic activity, but those theories do not invalidate the increase
in atmospheric carbon dioxide or its radiation-trapping effect.

Humanity
has already commandeered nearly half of the fruit of the world’s ecosystems, and
the greatest mass extinction episode since the dinosaurs
became extinct 65 million years ago is underway. Today, one-fourth of earth’s
mammal species are in immediate threat of extinction, and one-eighth of earth’s
bird species.[56]
Most of the world’s fishing grounds have either collapsed due to over-fishing,
or are on the verge of it. Wiping out the world’s ecosystems for human benefit
cannot continue much longer, and ecosystem collapses are already happening, initiated
by human exploitation.[57]

The
energy racket works on many levels. The automobile and oil companies banded together
to create an industry front group called the Global Climate Coalition. They have
tried defeating all international efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions. Their
undermining of the Kyoto Protocol, which called for extremely modest reductions
in fossil fuel emissions, is a case in point, especially with the current, un-elected
American president in their back pocket. In 2000, even oil companies began
admitting that global warming was a real phenomenon, and they abandoned the Global
Climate Coalition, which then had to reorganize. Ideology and disinformation
are two powerful tools they use. Academics such as Julian
Simon purvey “scholarship” that shows that all is well. As David
Edwards and others have been noting for many years, the oil companies bought
up a handful of scientists to publicly display their “skepticism” that global
warming is real, or a hazard.[58]
Then, people such as Julian Simon and our supine media feature them as credible
scientists, their interest-conflicted opinions counting just as much as that
of the 3000 scientists that make up the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC). It goes further than that.

The
IPCC has been charting the effects of global warming, and the potentially catastrophic
effects that are just around the corner. The only real debate is whether earth’s
surface will increase by “only” a few degrees or ten in the next century, an event
that may be unique in earth’s multi-billion-year history. Oceans will rise, perhaps
dramatically, as the polar ice caps disappear. Superstorms are already happening,
with natural disasters increasing at a rate of 6% per year for the past generation,
as the casualty insurance industry well knows. Island nations such as the Maldives
will simply disappear under the rising ocean. Where I sit as I write these words
may be underwater in my lifetime, if the oil companies have their way. If we
get the predicted several degree rise in temperatures, under the current methods
and technologies employed, it may mean the deaths of billions of people from starvation
and disease, which will likely trigger nuclear
wars, or worse, even if we do not wage Armageddon
over the energy sources. Each IPCC report has been more ominous than the last,
and the mainstream news today is filled with articles on shrinking and collapsing
ice caps.[59]

There is a plethora of other
problems created by burning fossil fuels. Atmospheric oxygen is captured and
combined into water when hydrocarbons are burned, which has been decreasing atmospheric oxygen. Atmospheric oxygen
is the raw material for the ozone layer. So, declining atmospheric oxygen may
be contributing to the ozone layer hole. Polluting the oceans is killing off
the photosynthesis that ocean algae produces, which comprises about 80% of all
earthly photosynthesis, which creates oxygen as a byproduct.

The
United States is the only nation on earth that has consistently opposed any limitations on the use of nuclear
weapons, undermining every treaty it can. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate
energy weapons these days, creating a horrific burst of energy. In April
2002, the United States snubbed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty meeting in Vienna.
It has attacked and undermined every organization, and attempted to sack every
official, who attempts to limit chemical weapons (Jose Bustani was sacked in April
also), unconventional weapons inspectors (Hans Blix was “investigated” by the
CIA in April, because his findings did not support the
“weapons of mass destruction” fraud angle the U.S. is trying to use to justify
invading Iraq) and anything or anybody else who
gets in the U.S.’ way.[60] If there ever
was a rogue state, it is the United States.

Demagogues
throughout the millennia have exploited human gullibility and complacency, and
quite effectively. Adolf Hitler wrote in his Mein Kampf,

“The
great masses of people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted
rather than consciously and purposely evil…therefore, in view of the primitive
simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to
a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed
of lies that were too big.”

Hitler
exploited that human tendency to deceive to mount history’s
most destructive war, born of economic hardship. Germany and Japan
wanted to come to the imperial card game with the other big players - Britain,
France and the United States in particular - but the imperial
powers already “owned” the world. Today’s political-economic systems are
simply more refined means of exploitation, with most Americans scarcely realizing
the ways in which they are exploited. The Zero-Sum Game is
still being played, but a huge body of lies has been erected
(in America, at least) to make it seem that it is not. The term “American
Empire” seems like an oxymoron to most Americans, which demonstrates how effective
the indoctrination systems are.[61]

In
theory, the Industrial Revolution increased humanity’s
real wealth, as human-friendly products were made in factories. The world’s real
wealth bank account, however, shows no such thing. In reality, the bank account
has been drained at an unprecedented rate. All those fossil fuels were the result
of life forms putting energy into earth’s “wealth bank” (or even worse, if Gold is right). Drawing that energy wealth out “of the bank,”
at a rate about one million times greater than it went in, has fueled the past
200 years of Western “progress.” Hundreds of millions of years of fossil
fuel creation will be burned up in mere hundreds of years.

As
Carl Sauer wisely perceived, the so-called wealth
created during the Industrial Revolution is largely fictitious; our system measures
the output, but not the cost. If our fossil energy sources went away tomorrow,
the West would largely and quickly revert to the pre-industrial economy of Europe,
using feet and animals for transportation, and most who survived the transition
would become farmers again. The human population would decline, commensurate
with the available food energy, which would decline with de-industrialization.
Plundering ancient reserves of sunlight is not wealth-creating activity, and the
long-term environmental devastation is a cost that humanity will be repaying for
a long, long time, if we even survive it.

The
energy industry probably does not deserve to exist. Dennis was working toward
a thermodynamic answer to free energy. Others work with vortex energy, magnets,
energy from the "vacuum" and other things. What is coming soon for
humanity is the end of moving part technology. Future free energy machines will
have no moving parts and last nearly indefinitely, eliminating the energy industry.
Even conventional solar technology could probably meet the world's energy needs
today, but the energy oligopolies have bought up those technologies and seem to
be developing them at a snail's pace. Why is this?

During
the past generation, the energy bill in America has fluctuated between 7% and
10% of the national economy. Right there is 8% of the economy that is total deadweight,
lining the pockets of the energy gangsters while devastating the environment,
and murdering millions of people in places such as East
Timor, Nigeria and Iraq
to keep the cheap oil flowing. Eight percent is conservative. Most of America’s
defense budget today (around 4% of the economy) is there
to secure access to foreign oil supplies and other commodities. The interest
on the national debt is about 40% of the energy industry's revenues, and is mainly
the result of all the military spending since World War II. A significant chunk
of that is related to keeping the international arena safe for oil production
and importation to the United States. Between 1973 and 1995, the share of foreign
oil in America's consumption doubled, from 26% to 52%.[62]
The number will only climb, and is one more factor that brings recent events in
Iraq and Afghanistan into a sharper focus.

When discussing the real economy, where
price tags are put on things the market does not value (such as environmental
devastation, the cost of the military, interest on the national debt, the human
cost of mass murder and genocide to keep control over the oil), the total become
immense. Could the true cost of the energy industry be half of our economy?
More? Putting a price on human life is macabre. If our oil greed leads to World
War III, what price tag goes on destroying humanity and the planet? I doubt the
economists can perform that analysis.

When
Dennis teamed up with Yull Brown, Dennis and I spoke
at Department of Energy (DOE) hearings regarding the disposal of nuclear waste
in America. Brown's Gas can apparently transmute nuclear material, once again
doing something that conventional physics regards as "impossible."
The Brown's Gas and nuclear material demonstration has been done many times, even
in front of DOE personnel with their Geiger counters in hand. The nuclear waste
hearings were a ruse to create a fig leaf of consent for the program that was
already chosen by the Big Boys. At the hearings, I spoke first about Brown's
Gas and its potential, and Dennis went next, trying to convince the DOE to at
least look into the Brown's Gas solution, instead of burying the waste in the
earth, hoping that nothing happens to it for the next 250,000 years.

The
meeting we attended was in South Carolina, next to the Savannah nuclear facility
that nearly glows at night from the waste of America's nuclear weapons program.
The hearings were sparsely attended, mainly by the contractors who stand to make
a killing from "managing" nuclear waste. As it stands today, there
will probably be more than one trillion dollars spent to "manage" the
nuclear waste problem, and managing it just means sticking it in the ground and
hoping it never comes back up. It is similar to whistling in the dark, but if
something bad happens, future generations (if there are any) will likely pay for
it, not us. The Brown's Gas proposal could do the job for a few percent of the
trillion dollar total, and it would be a permanent solution, not something that
would come back to haunt future generations.

When
I began speaking, it got people's attention as I related the facts of Brown's
Gas and the numerous demonstrations of its transmutational properties. The recent
motion picture Chain Reaction is a thinly disguised story about Yull Brown
and his discoveries. The people who made that movie picked Brown's brain for
a few days, years ago, leading him to believe they were going to help his project
get off the ground. After they picked his brain they disappeared, and a couple
years later their movie Chain Reaction appeared, without giving Brown a
cent.

After I related the facts, Dennis
went into his salesman's mode and a DOE man who ran the hearings approached us
in the parking lot after our first presentation. He said that we were the third
group that had spoken at the hearings, presenting a neutralization technology
to solve the problem. He said he was excited about what we had presented and
would do what he could at the DOE, but admitted that he was an underling with
little power. Then he said something I will never forget,

"There
are people who stand to make a lot of money in managing nuclear waste. If your
solution does not make them money, it will not go anywhere."

That is the reality of nuclear waste management.
The point is making a financial killing today, and setting up a racket that will
see the dollars flow in for generations.

When
I was with Dennis briefly in 1996 -1997, there was an “inventor” who was making
bootlegged versions of Brown’s Gas machines, while saying that there was no real
patent protection that Brown had, which was probably true, but it was not exactly
an ethical position to take. He also criticized Dennis, saying that he treated
Brown poorly. The opposite was true. We treated Brown like a king, and paid
him like one. Back in 1996, Dennis told me that the Brown’s Gas “inventor” was
a different kind of provocateur than Mr. Hit Man was. Mr. Hit Man worked on a ruthless level,
where people can die. The Brown’s Gas “inventor”
however, just copied whatever Dennis did, trying to take the wind out of his sails
by offering a pirated version of his wares. I did not know why Dennis thought
that way about the inventor, besides seeing what he was doing with Brown’s Gas.
The next year however, a “fringe science” journalist wrote a book about the “coming
energy revolution.” She featured that Brown’s Gas “inventor,” and featured his
“Low Temperature Phase Change” invention, where he was going to try making free
energy by using heat pump energy to try running a heat engine.[63]
When I read that, I began thinking that he might be exactly what Dennis said he
was, because “Low Temperature Phase Change” was
the exact term that Dennis coined when he began making his free energy noise in
1986.

Marginalizing
the true pioneers is how the establishment works, even on its fringes. Tom
Bearden has documented the T. Henry Moray story well, as have others.[64]
Moray was a generation ahead of his time in developing the first semiconductors
we know of, in the 1920s, and developed a free energy device that was demonstrated
many times in conditions that seemed to preclude any other conceivable energy
source. The device was disassembled and reassembled many times. Franklin Roosevelt
directed the U.S. Rural Electrical Administration (REA) to work with Moray, and
an agent from the REA destroyed Moray's prototype with a hammer. Moray had gunfights
in his lab with various saboteurs. His car was fired on and bullets passed through
his car. It is one of the more high profile cases of how a free energy pioneer
was wiped out. Writing Tesla out of the history books is
standard operating procedure, while his failed rival Edison is a household word.

What this essay has not yet discussed are "free
energy" demonstrations that members of our organizations have witnessed over
the years. Tom Bearden's talk at Hoagland's
conference might seem to be paranoid conspiracy theorizing but Bearden was talking
about experiences, not theory. One free energy demonstration we had was
from an inventor that Bearden also worked with. The technology appeared extremely
genuine, but the inventors were receiving awe-inspiring suppression. There are
also stories about technologies being violently wiped out, entire families murdered,
and their houses set on fire and bulldozed, tales not told me by “conspiracy theorists,”
but hard-nosed scientists.

It
appears as if Tom Bearden, as he has reached his 70s, has finally decided to go for it. The free energy technology
that he and his friends hope to put on the market is similar to technology that
I have known of for many years. As with Fischer challenging Carnot’s assumption of an
ideal gas, or Einstein’s challenging of Newton’s assumption of absolute
time and space, the technical paper that Bearden and friends have published challenges
the theories of electricityat their root,
going clear back to when James Maxwell was doing the original work. I know highly
qualified scientists who have watched that technology in action. It is very real.

Whether Bearden and friends
live long enough to make it happen depends on many factors, including how the
public supports them, or does not. Hearing Bearden talk about his technology
is an amazing experience, and not something the layman can easily follow. It
was difficult to keep up with him, and the explanation borders on the surreal,
where Bearden says the key is taking advantage of a “negative time wave,” making
time run backward, and taking advantage of the fourth dimension. It might seem
ludicrous, but the proof is watching it work, and scientists I respect have done
so. With no moving parts, and being able to send excess energy back where it
came from, for zero environmental impact (not even thermal pollution), this may
be the energy of the future.

The potential
of free energy is a lot bigger than just eliminating earth’s most destructive
industry. Free energy is probably the greatest single step in toppling the Zero-Sum-Game
paradigm that humanity has been operating under for the past 10,000 years. With
free, renewable, non-polluting energy, especially when combined with machines,
robotics and computers (going back to the basics of the rise of
humanity - energy, manipulative ability and intelligence) the reasons why
humans exploit each other and the environment can evaporate, and humanity can
finally begin to grow up. The kill-and-be-killed game that humanity has played
for the entirety of history can end, and free energy is probably the most important
first step. Without free energy, the rest may be close to impossible, unless
the world human population declines to a tiny fraction of today’s.

Accordingly,
it is collective insanity to sit and wait for Dennis Lee or Tom Bearden to make
it happen, or criticize them if they do not. It is time for humanity to grow
up and accept responsibility for what is, and dare to
create the world that prophets such as Jesus spoke of: heaven on earth. Technically,
it is child’s play, but if we do not wake up and care, it is an impossible dream,
and this nightmare will continue until humanity exterminates itself.

The Greatest Energy of All

There
is a lot more to this energy business than Dennis Lee, burning oil, and razing
forests to burn it and plant crops. Einstein’s immortal E=MC2 makes
everything in our universe equivalent to energy.[65]
Few scientists will try disputing Einstein’s equation. However, what is the basis
of energy? What happened before the Big Bang? Did everything come from nothing,
as the Big Bang asserts, in a theory that seems to be a warmed-over version of
“Let there be light”?

The greatest
scientific minds I have known were mystical in their perspective, realizing science’s
limits. History’s greatest physicists thought similarly.
If I may be so foolish, I am going to hazard some speculations about the nature
of energy and its relationship to this alternative/free energy conundrum.

Mystical literature often discusses the emotional
journey that humanity is on. Emotions are a source of truly unimaginable power.
Seth once said that an average, garden-variety human
emotion, the kind one might experience while reading the newspaper, has more energy
in it than it takes to send a rocket to the moon. If that is the case, it sure
does not appear that way to earthly humans, though the fear of strong emotional
states is highly evident in American culture. Many American men, especially those
of older generations, are emotional cripples.

Nevertheless, sources I respect, such as Robert
Shapiro’s Zoosh, say that human emotions are incredibly
powerful, and the uncontrolled (or unconscious) aspect of human emotions can be
highly dangerous for other physical species to be around. That is apparently
one reason why “alien abductions” seem to always
happen with the humans losing consciousness. “Abducted” humans are put to sleep
partly because if they were awake, their emotional reactions can kill the “aliens”
in the vicinity. Most humans will agree to the power that emotions possess, although
it is not always pleasant to have them. Yet, what underlies emotions? There
is interplay of emotion and mind happening. They do not seem to be the same thing,
and mystical sources state that that is the nature of the polarity and paradox
of our world. Beyond this plane, there comes a point where feelings and thoughts
unify into the same thing, as all of creation is one. Nice idea, but nobody here
can really experience such a concept.

Humanity
is on an evolutionary journey, and the critical
goal at this time is to come to a new level of emotional maturity, and bring the
heart into its rightful place, which is being awake and in charge. Mystical sources
have long stated that all emotions are aspects of love energy, which is what God
is, and it is the energy that has created this universe, and all of Creation.
Emotions can be seen as aspects of love, and rigidly (fearfully) holding onto
any of them is where we get into trouble. Embracing all emotional states at
once reduces it all to love. That is partly what Jesus was all about: demonstrating
the power of love. With love, anything is possible, in terms we can barely glimpse.
Love can move mountains, because mountains are love, as are we.

As we walk this immense spiritual journey,
learning who and what we are, in this dense dimension of limitation, some are
using us, feeding off of our negative emotional energy.
Michael Roads’ encounters with them are mind-blowing.
Although George Bush and friends may think they are “only”
grubbing for money and power, and inducing fear and misery in the general population
for dark ends, beings are above them in the food chain, feasting off of Bush and
friends as well, and the fear they induce and experience themselves. In this
system, everybody is ultimately a loser, in ways that most cannot, and
dare not, imagine.

Even if that seems
too way out, the tactic of taking advantage of fear, and controlling the great
herd of people, is easily comprehensible. Even a materialistic rationalist such
as Noam Chomsky says that “induced fear” is how the ruling classes manipulate
the masses, especially in “democratic” societies. Orwell’s
1984 stated the same thing. That is what drives the “war on drugs,”
the “war on terror,” the “war on communism,” the “war on cancer,” etc. Chomsky
sees little hope that humanity will manifest enough collective intelligence to
prevent its demise by its own hand. He is one of the most humane and courageous
people that America has produced, and he is having a difficult time staying optimistic,
particularly after the World Trade Center attacks.

A
great deal of the manipulation can be chalked up to reality control, as Orwell
also wrote about in his prophetic 1984.
I was told a steady stream of lies for my entire childhood,
which apparently was to set me up to believe all the “reasonable” lies I would
be fed as an adult. As we unthinkingly adopt the paradigms that are fed us, they
blind us, so we can be easily manipulated and
controlled. The scientists who laugh at “free energy” as “impossible” are the
professional descendants of those who laughed at the notion of Edison’s
light bulb, the Wright brothers’ airplane, the findings
of Naessens’ and Rife’s microscopes, the transmutational properties
of Brown’s Gas and LamCo COPs of
seven. Until they investigate with an open mind, they cannot have
an informed opinion on the issue. Also, they will need to use a little creativity,
so they can see past the barriers to comprehension that reductionistic analysis
can produce.

As
we are brainwashed into what is “possible,” we are easily manipulated. As “scientists”
and others automatically reject “free energy” as “absurd,” the Zero-Sum
Game is further enforced, on a subtle and largely unconscious level. Then,
transparently false rationales are concocted to create a superficially noble cover
story for killing off a generation of Iraqi children,
so the United States secures cheap access to oil and big profits for the oil
companies who own the American president. All the exploitation is justified,
because everybody is operating from the Zero-Sum-Game assumption. There
has been some “progress,” where legal slavery
has supposedly been abolished, but it has largely been replaced with subtler forms
of slavery. That is what ideology is mainly about: getting the exploited to accept
their circumstances, and making the violators and exploiters "right.”

The foundation of earth’s ecosystems - the
acquisition and use of energy - which humanity rides atop, has never changed.
Kill-or-be-killed is not only a tired game; humanity has reached the stage where
the arena is being destroyed, due to the game itself. The, “I win, you lose”
game is the epitome of the Young Soul awareness.
Free, gentle, non-polluting, forever renewable energy can
trigger the next step in our journey back to our divine origins, to where
we were before we took our “fall.”

In
very real terms, the love for humanity that Dennis Lee has is directly related
to his “free energy” quest. Love is energy, and love is the only
answer.

Peace.

Footnotes

[1] Nobody working in the field of anthropology
disputes that the fossil evidence supports the notion that humanity’s evolutionary
ancestors lived in Africa. In early 21st century anthropology, the
primary question is if Homo sapiens sapiens evolved in Africa or among
descendents of the members of Homo erectus that began migrating beyond
Africa somewhat less than two million years ago. The majority view today is that
Homo sapiens sapiens evolved in East Africa somewhere between 200,000 and
100,000 year ago, and as they migrated across the planet, particularly after their
“great leap forward” about 40,000 years ago, they displaced all other hominid
species, including Neanderthals, who are likely also descended from Homo erectus.
Recent advances in molecular biology (where DNA can be tested) have tended to
support the “Out of Africa” hypothesis, although there is controversy swirling
around even some of the most elementary concepts. For some relatively recent
popular books on the subject, see Ian Tattersall’s The Fossil Trail, Jared
Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee and Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie’s
African Exodus.

[2] For this early history of energy and
humanity, I have used many sources. The Internet has helped at times, as have
encyclopedias such as Encarta. Also, books such as Andrew Goudie’s The
Human Impact on the Natural Environment, Clive Ponting’s A Green History
of the World, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and other works
have helped, such as some of my college textbooks. There is plenty of controversy
about numerous aspects of the distant human past, and this rendition hews more
toward the orthodox viewpoint today. This web site points out numerous suppressions
of data that have failed to conform to the orthodox theories, such as what happened
to Virginia Steen-McIntyre. All views of
the ancient past are subject to radical revision as more becomes known. If the
UFO phenomenon finally comes into the open, a lot
may change.

[3] Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee
surveys the mass extinctions that followed in humanity’s wake, including how the
English completely exterminated the native inhabitants of Tasmania in the 18th
and 19th centuries.

[4] Paul Martin of the University of Arizona
first presented the “overkill” hypothesis for North American megafauna extinctions
in 1967. Peter Ward of the University of Washington is considered a leading investigator/author
in the field of mass extinctions. Don Grayson, also of the University of Washington,
is the leading voice on refuting the idea that humanity drove the megafauna to
extinction, particularly in North America.

In
his The Call of Distant Mammoths, published in 1997, Ward presents a multi-disciplinary
inquiry of the subject and shows how driving the megafauna to extinction did not
mean killing off every last one, but reducing their numbers to a level where they
could easily go extinct if other factors impacted them, such as a few years of
bad weather or other natural disaster. Ward finished his book by presenting what
he considered the last word on the subject (at least for now), which was the research
of Dan Fisher on mammoth tusks. By studying the growth rings on mammoth tusks
(like tree rings), Fisher was able to determine gestation rates for females, because
their tusks have little growth when gestating, as their available nutrients (especially
calcium, as far as tusk growth goes) are dedicated toward the growing fetus.
The ring study showed that as mammoths were going extinct, the females were reproducing
at vibrant rate, a rate that would not occur if they were starving, and a rate
(a birth every four years) that suggested they bred quickly to make up for rapidly
declining numbers, as the birth rate equaled the birth rate of today’s elephants
that are actively hunted by humans. Grayson has been also publishing his research
findings, and recently made the case that there is not enough evidence of humans
at megafauna kill sites to support the notion that humans hunted them all to extinction.

There are other concepts
such as “keystone” species that support arguments that the Pleistocene hunters
did not need to kill off every member of every species to tip the scales in the
direction of mass extinctions. The debate will probably rage for many years,
but I consider the evidence for mass extinctions soon after humans first arrived
to be quite persuasive, particularly when there is so much evidence for it happening
in historical times. Also, the primary other theory of late-Pleistocene mass
extinction, climate change, has serious shortcomings, such all those extinct species
survived drastic climate changes during the previous millions of years of glaciation
cycles, to “coincidentally” go extinct when the latest interglacial period was
accompanied by a new super-predator that those species had never encountered before.
Also, mass extinctions happened where there was no drastic climate change (as
in South America and Australia), but the megafauna all became extinct soon after
humans arrived. It is theorized that humans did not necessarily hunt the Australian
megafauna to extinction, but used fire to clear the land as a subsistence tool,
and thereby drove the megafauna there to extinction.

[21] Fahrenheit is known as a relative
temperature scale. The temperature needs to be converted into an absolute temperature
in order to calculate the maximum possible efficiency. William Kelvin was knighted
for his work with gases, and he theorized a minimum possible temperature, known
today as absolute zero. The Rankine (R) temperature scale is the absolute temperature
scale that uses the Fahrenheit degree interval. 0° F is equal to
460° R. So 2000° F and 55° F convert to
2560° R and 515° R, and the Carnot equation equals (2560-515)/2560
= 80%. That means that the steam turbine at the local electric company can get
no more than an 80% efficiency.

[23]The reason why heat engines combined with heat pumps can provide
more energy than simply burning heat engine fuel for heat is because the heat
pump is not heating the exhaust medium back to the temperature of the heat engine’s
boiler. If a steam turbine burned coal to get 2000° F boiler temperatures
(as today’s electric companies do), getting electricity-conversion 35% efficiency,
and a heat pump used the resultant electric energy to heat up a lake to 2000°
F, its COP would obviously be low, probably far less than 0.5. Then 35% X 0.5
is 17.5%. If the coal was burned in the home, it would be burned at more than
90% efficiency, so it would obviously be cheaper to heat the home with coal.
In the real world, however, most heating energy is used to merely create human-friendly
environments, so coal burned in the home is only used to heat a home to 72°
F, not an electric company boiler to 2000° F. A heat pump taking
heat from the environment at 40° F, and moving it inside a home to
heat it up, could theoretically reach a COP of 16.6 ((532/(532-500), in degrees
Rankine). If heat pumps could reach half the Carnot ideal, as steam turbines
do, then we have a COP of about 8, which, combined with steam turbine efficiency
of 35%, means that for every unit of heat released when coal was burned at the
electric company, 2.8 (0.35 x 8) units of heat could be delivered into the home.
On a macroeconomic basis, this is highly energy efficient, nearly three times
as efficient as burning coal to create heated, human-friendly environments.

[24]In an electric company steam
turbine, water is the working medium, going through its cycle of liquid to gas
and back to liquid. In a household refrigerator, a substance called Freon is
most often used. Freon is an artificial compound made from carbon, chlorine and
fluorine, which has a low boiling point, -22° F at atmospheric pressure.
Every substance has a melting and boiling point, and the pressure it is subjected
to will determine that point. Water can boil at room temperature if it is subjected
to a vacuum. Pressure cookers work by the reverse principle. Subjecting water
to greater than atmospheric pressure will raise its boiling point. So, the pressure
cookers that Americans use in their kitchens may operate at 250°
F instead of the usual 212° F at sea level, so the food cooks faster.

In a refrigerator, the boiling and condensing
point of the Freon is manipulated by altering the pressure it is subjected to.
The diagram below depicts Freon’s journey through a kitchen refrigerator.

In this illustration,
the Freon's journey will begin in the receiver, as a liquid, lying in the receiver’s
bottom. It is at 80° F. The Freon will boil at -22°
F at atmospheric pressure, but in the receiver, it is under about 100 pounds per
square inch (PSI). The pump circulates the Freon through its cycle, and the Freon
is pushed through a tube where it meets an expansion valve. An expansion valve
merely allows the liquid Freon through at a measured rate, where the other side
of the valve has a lower pressure. As the Freon goes through the valve (the valve
works just like the valve on an aerosol can), it meets a lower pressure past the
valve, of 37 PSI. At that pressure, Freon will boil at 40° F, and
boil it does. When something boils, it takes a great deal of energy to break
the bonds that attract the molecules to each other. It takes about six times
as much energy to make water boil when it is at 212° F than it does
to raise its temperature from 55° F to 212° F. To test
that number, if you put a pan of water on the stove to boil, it will take about
six times as long for it to boil dry than it took to make it boil in the first
place. That threshold at the boiling point is known as a state or phase change
(the water changes from one state to another, liquid to gas in this case), and
it is an immense energy sponge. The energy is going into breaking the inter-molecular
attraction of the water molecules.

As
that Freon boils at 40° F in the evaporator (it is obvious why that
component is so named), the evaporator attains a 40° F temperature.
The air in the refrigerator compartment, where the lasagna sits, is 45°
F. According to Carnot’s observation, the air in the refrigerator compartment
will give its heat to the evaporator, because the air is warmer. In a running
refrigerator, that evaporator is where the heat is being continually sucked from
the refrigerator, keeping the lasagna cool, slowing its decay rate. As the Freon
boils, the pressure goes up, and oddly, the high-pressure liquid becomes a low-pressure
gas at a much cooler temperature. As the Freon gas continues its journey through
the refrigerator, it encounters the pump that makes it all work. The pump slams
the Freon to the other side, and the Freon gets “squeezed.” As it is “squeezed”
by the pumping process it attains a much higher pressure, such as 100 PSI, and
accordingly gets much hotter. Energy systems have entropy and enthalpy, or disorder
and useful energy. In that instance, increasing entropy would be greater disorder
of the molecules, and increasing enthalpy would be the increase of temperature.
With nowhere to go, even losing its entropy, as the molecules are forced closer
together, the temperature increases.

The
Freon reaches 130° F on the pump’s other side. The high temperature
gas then enters the condenser. The condenser is exposed to the kitchen air.
Sometimes a fan will force the kitchen’s air across the condenser. Again, going
back to Carnot, the 130° F condenser (usually put on the back of
refrigerators or underneath them, so nobody gets burned touching it) will give
its heat to the 72° F kitchen. As the Freon gives its heat to the
kitchen air through its contact with the condenser, it cools down. As it cools
down, it again crosses the temperature/pressure boiling/condensing “line,” and
turns back into a liquid, which is why that component is called a condenser.
The resultant liquid/gas mixture is dumped into the receiver, the liquid settling
to the bottom, where the intake tube sends it to the expansion valve to begin
the cycle anew.

That
is how a refrigerator works, continually sucking heat from inside the refrigerator
and dumping it into America’s kitchens. It is a heat pump.

[33] See Westfall, The Life of Isaac
Newton, for a fairly sympathetic treatment of that situation. Stephen Hawking,
who sits in Newton's chair at Cambridge, and is one of the greatest scientific
minds of our time, is less charitable regarding Newton's behavior. See Hawking,
A Brief History of Time, pp. 181-182.

[34] See a brief account of the Birkeland-Chapman-Alfvén
tale in Candace Savage's Auroras, pp. 92-110.

[36] It is easy to descend into that fray.
On the Internet are numerous sources of information on that debate. Books such
as Henry Bauer's Beyond Velikovsky, Pensee's Velikovsky Reconsidered,
Charles Ginenthal's Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky, Scientists Confront
Velikovsky, edited by Donald Goldsmith, and Stephen J. Gould and Immanuel
Velikovsky, edited by Dale Ann Pearlman, are a good introduction to the Velikovsky
controversy, with, of course, the book that started it all, Velikovsky's Worlds
in Collision, which is not easy to find today. There are journals published
regarding the work of Velikovsky such as The Velikovskian and Aeon.
David Talbott's Kronia Group is also carrying on the work of Velikovsky. There
are forums that have "debunked" much of the pro-Velikovsky crowd, such
as the Talk Origins group. Leroy Ellenberger is a Velikovskian apostate who is
glad to provide evidence of his thesis, which is that the pro-Velikovsky crowd
is largely delusional. It is an invitation to madness to descend into that fray.
There is a lot of mud wrestling going on there. My opinion on the issue today
is a big "maybe, but I doubt it." The issue is intriguing, and I will
probably keep my hand in it. If I ever find the time, I plan on resuming my science
studies, and study the dating issue, which impacts a number of areas of interest
for me, including Velikovsky’s thesis. Velikovsky's thesis exercised Einstein's
mind, and it is easy to see why.

[51] Many years later, I interviewed that
rocket scientist as I was on a document hunt regarding Mr. Mentor’s engine, and
while the rocket scientist indeed was awed by the engine, he recalled how he came
to comprehend its potential differently. He said he largely came to understand
its potential on the basis of his own analysis, with little help from Mr. Mentor.
They are probably both right, to a degree, but it also shows how we all remember
things differently.

[53] The sources of my information regarding
energy use, prices and sources comes from the U.S. Department of Energy’s data,
mainly from its 2001 Annual Energy Review and associated reports. I have
also used The American Almanac, 1996-1997 for some of this information,
such as tables 1334 and 1358, for my economics/energy analyses.

[54] See Clive Ponting’s A Green History
of the World, pp. 387-389. See also Goudie’s The Human Impact, pp.
333-343.

[55] Unmanned probes to Mars during the
1990s have recorded what appears to be rapid melting of the carbon dioxide ice
pack. Those stories hit the global media in late 2001.

[56] In late 2000, the World Conservation
Union published its Year 2000 Red List of Threatened Species. More than
11,000 species risk extinction today. That list is only composed of those species
that have been identified. More that 14 million species of life are estimated
to live on earth, and less than two million have been identified. Perhaps a half
million or more species became extinct during the 1990s.

[57]For instance, the decline in perch and herring populations off
the Alaskan coast depressed the populations of seals and sea lions, which were
killer whale prey. The killer whales ate otters in the absence of their usual
prey, which collapsed the otter population, which in turn caused a population
explosion in one of the otter's favorite foods - sea urchins. The sea urchin
population explosion in turn devastated the kelp beds on which they feed. The
disappearance of the kelp beds in turn threatens the existence of numerous species
that depend on them, including fish, birds, marine mammals and numerous other
creatures. See Chris Bright’s “Anticipating Environmental ‘Surprise’” in State
of the World 2000, pp. 22-38. Numerous fish species also face human-caused
extinction; something that orthodox theory previously held was impossible.

[58]For instance, Fred Singer is a
leading scientist who downplays the notion of global warming, and has "consulted"
for several oil companies. Patrick Michaels is another prominent scientist who
downplays global warming, who also makes big money "consulting" for
coal companies and other energy interests (they both are prominent authors in
Julian Simon'sThe State of Humanity. See also
Ehrlich and Ehrlich, Betrayal of Science and Reason). In the year 2000,
several events happened which should take most of the air out of the sails of
the oil company "skeptics" regarding global warming. According to the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. winter of 1999-2000
was the warmest on record. The spring of 2000 was also the warmest spring in
U.S. history. Since measurements began over a century ago, the eleven hottest
years on record, globally, have all been since 1980. Though the New York Times
reported a mile-wide hole in the Arctic ice at the North Pole in the summer of
2000, a report that has been discredited as normal summer thawing, the Arctic
ice pack is 40% thinner than it was fifty years ago, and the Antarctic ice shelves
have been breaking up. Glaciers have been retreating across the planet. The
polar bear will be extinct in the wild in a generation at the rate that warming
is happening today. The U.S. National Research Council in January 2000 issued
a report titled, "Reconciling Observations of Global Temperature Change."
The report states that "the warming of surface temperature that has taken
place during the past 20 years is undoubtedly real, and it is at a rate substantially
larger than the average warming during the twentieth century." In February
2000, scientists at the NOAA's National Climate Data Center (NCDC) reported that
the rate of global warming is increasing over the past twenty-five years (in a
report published in the March 1 issue of Geophysical Research Letters).
The evidence is strong that the rate of increase since 1976 is likely human-induced,
according to the NCDC scientists. In June 2000, the U.S. Global Change Research
Program released a report that predicted that global fossil fuel emissions would
increase the U.S. temperatures by 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100.
In the September 15, 2000 issue of Science, the findings of an international
scientific expedition were published. Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University
led the 1997 expedition, and it obtained ice core samples from the Dasuopu Glacier
on the Himalayan mountain Xixabangma. The ice cores were obtained at 23,500 feet
of elevation above sea level, the highest elevation ice cores ever obtained.
The global warming models predict that higher elevations and higher latitudes
will show the effects first. The highest latitudes are the Polar Regions, and
the Himalayan ice cores reveal what is happening at high altitude. The ice cores
showed that the past fifty years have been the warmest in the past thousand years.
Dust particles had increased four-fold in the past century, and the ice layers
gave signs of desertification happening in the region. Thompson said, "There
is no question in my mind that the warming is in part, if not totally, driven
by human activity. I think the evidence for that is so clear - not only from
this site but also from Kilimanjaro in Africa." Thompson led a team to Kilimanjaro
in 2000, where the ice on it has declined by over 75% in the past century. Such
dramatic warming can create unprecedented human suffering, with droughts and other
climate changes that could kill off billions of people and destroy entire ecosystems.
Recently, companies like Texaco, Shell, British Petroleum, Ford, DaimlerChrysler
and General Motors quit their membership in the Global Climate Coalition, which
is an industry front group that is determined to undermine any global efforts
to reduce fossil fuel emissions. In the wake of the massive corporate abandonment
of the coalition, it had to reorganize. Those were items from 2000, and in 2002,
each report coming out for the past two years has been more alarming than the
previous one.

[59]For a mere sampling of current
information that is easily available, on May 14, 2002, the World Wildlife Fund
(WWF) issued a report on the peril the polar bears face. Reuters, a non-U.S.-based
media organization, reported it. (Will Dunham, Reuters, “Arctic Warming
Imperils Polar Bears, Report Says.” May 14, 2002). The WWF report
noted that industrial pollution, including mercury and other heavy metals, radioactive
waste, pesticides and industrial toxic waste are imperiling the polar bear, but
the effects of global warming are the most ominous. The polar ice has declined
in thickness by about 40% since World War II, and current computer models show
that summer sea ice may decline by 60% in the next 50 years. The polar bears
in the Hudson Bay area are already exhibiting early signs of what is in store
for them. Going into the birthing season, female bears are in poorer condition
than they used to be, reflecting a decline in food sources, among other stresses.
On the same day, Reuters ran an article on the breakup of the Antarctic
ice cap. (Michael Byrnes, Reuters, “Antarctic Ice Melt Poses Worldwide
Threat.” May 14, 2002.) Scientists are already calling the breakup of the Antarctic
ice cap the biggest one since the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago.
In April 2002, a 500-billion-ton chunk of the Larsen Ice Shelf - more than a thousand
square miles and 650 feet thick – broke off, climaxing an unprecedented summer
of ice shelf disintegration, in the Antarctic’s warmest recorded summer. That
is highly abnormal activity, and is one of a series of recent events that may
presage a catastrophic disintegration of the Antarctic ice cap.

Whether
tracking species threatened with extinction or global warming, today’s common
dynamic is scientists eventually realize that their earlier reports, though alarming,
have often been understating the true threat, as conditions conflate, creating
mutually reinforcing runaway events that the models do not predict. The IPCC
reports have become more ominous with each one. The rapid disintegration of the
Antarctic ice shelves will not immediately raise the world’s sea levels, because
they are largely floating, so their net displacement is small (similar to an ice
cube floating in a drink not raise the drink’s level in the glass as it melts).
However, as they disintegrate and float away from Antarctica, it will expose the
continental ice shelves, and their melting will increase the world’s sea
levels. The reality is that nobody really knows how fast the continental ice
shelves can collapse. The disintegration of the Larsen B ice shelf was dramatic
and not predicted, and could herald similar rapid collapse around the entire Antarctic
ice shelf.

At
this time, the predicted rise in the global ocean level is perhaps “only” a meter
or two in the coming century. The leading scientists readily admit, though, that
models are only guesses, no matter how sophisticated, and in light of the Larsen
B ice shelf collapse the past few months, a “snowball” effect is admittedly quite
possible. Also, the rising of ocean levels is but one component of the environmental
effect. The release of fresh water from Antarctic melting could also affect the
circulation patterns of earth’s oceans. The Gulf Stream, that
makes European winters as relatively warm as they are, for how far north Europe
is, could be diminished by Antarctic melting, and Antarctica is the main source
of introducing oxygenated water to the ocean floor. That dynamic will also be
diminished. It is already estimated that the “bottom water” production by Antarctica
has already declined by 20% since pre-industrial times. The continued decline
in “bottom water” production will further threaten earth’s marine life. These
dynamics are part of “cascading” environmental disasters,
which defy the relatively simple models that scientists have developed.

Corporate mouthpieces
such as Rush Limbaugh have been crusading against the notion of global warming
or any true environmental problems being created by corporate greed. With these
recent, alarming developments, Big Oil has been making its countermoves. Not
only is the United States giving the finger to the world on issues of controlling
greenhouse gas emissions, but a recent memo from ExxonMobil to George Bush the
Second, brought to light by a Freedom of Information Act action, called for the
removal of the IPCC head, Robert Watson, because his stance was a little too “aggressive”
in trying to confront and solve the issues of global warming. On April 20, 2002
ExxonMobil got its wish, as Watson was replaced. (See George Monbiot’s “Diplomacy,
U.S. Style,” in The Guardian, April 23, 2002. See also Paul Brown’s “Oil
giant bids to replace climate expert” in The Guardian, April 5, 2002.)
That is typical “diplomatic” behavior by the
United States. Tellingly, the U.S. media is not where
I am finding these reports, but in Europe’s media.

[60] See George Monbiot’s “Diplomatic
Impunity” a ZNet article, published on April 24, 2002.